Adrienne Noctis

Peonies for the Year of Waking follows a Vietnamese-American woman who runs a funeral flower shop in a tightly knit neighborhood where ritual, memory, and obligation shape daily life. Competent, guarded, and deeply private, she has spent years turning sorrow into orderly work. But when the dead man she loved returns in impossible form, her careful world begins to fracture. As the days unfold, she is forced to reckon with the truth of what happened, what was left unsaid, and whether love can survive when memory itself becomes unstable.
Blending literary realism with a quiet supernatural thread, this novel traces the shape of grief, the weight of inherited duty, and the fragile possibility of waking into a life changed forever.