PRE-ORDER: Always Never Knowing

AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER

Pre-order Always Never Knowing by Georgiana Quintanilla Tyquiengco for a special pre-order price of $15 (Regular Price: $17).

Please note: Always Never Knowing is currently available for pre-order only. Orders will be fulfilled and available for pick-up upon the official release date estimated to be June 14, 2025. 

Always Never Knowing is a collection of stories following Jiavonna “Vonna” Cepeda through her adolescence in southern Guam. Each short story explores different moments in Vonna’s life when she must balance the expectations of her strict parents with her own desires and expectations for herself.  Each new experience seems to bring more questions than answers—about her home, her relationships, and her cultural identity. Vonna must decide whom she wants to become in a world that seems to be constantly shifting around her. With her humor, wit, and budding wisdom, she navigates family struggles with mental illness, changing friendships, and even first crushes.

Always Never Knowing’s richly textured stories interweave poetry, text messages, secret notes passed between friends, and more, offering a fresh and immersive glimpse into adolescence and a village girl’s coming of age in contemporary Guam.

Praise for Always Never Knowing:

 Georgiana Quintanilla Tyquiengco's Always Never Knowing is a sweet dive into life on Guam. The stories are told through the eyes of a young girl, a Pasifika version of the bildungsroman. Tyquiengco's stories are slice of life scenes from school, the village, a van behind a hotel with siblings, all described in an exactness, a precision so true to being young and steeped in the ways of being CHamoru on Guam.

— Teresita Perez, author of CHamoru Legends: A Gathering of Stories

Georgiana Quintanilla Tyquiengco’s debut Always Never Knowing is a collection of nine linked stories that at once trace the maturation of narrator Jiavonna over the course of her high school sophomore year and create a series of portraits of her friends and family members. “Meet Althea” is a particular standout, blending different forms—emails, poems, text messages, school reports— to offer understanding for the narrator’s mother and mental illness. Beautiful reading for any middle or high school student, these tender tales explore universal themes of belonging, becoming, and building empathy through the particular lens of a CHamoru-Filipina main character.

— Kristiana Kahakauwila, author of Clairboyance and This is Paradise: Stories

·       "The poet/writer in me must praise the poet/writer in Georgiana Quintanilla Tyquiengco for her textured honesty and lyrically courageous prose that is threaded within each story in Always Never Knowing"

— Terisa Siagatonu, co-editor of We the Gathered Heat: Asian American and Pacific Islander Poetry, Performance, and Spoken Word and author of the forthcoming children’s book, The Vastness of Us