A father's silence. A mother's memory. A brother's grief. In seventeen unforgettable stories, Donald Carreira Ching offers a powerful and deeply intimate portrait of contemporary life in Hawai'i.

On the Windward side of O'ahu, change moves fast—developers buy up neighborhoods, locals move away, and families struggle to hold on to what's left. But beneath the surface of each loss is something more enduring: memory, love, and the quiet acts of resilience that refuse to be forgotten. A son unearths a family's buried history through an old VHS tape. Friends haunted by war confront their pain in backyards and barroom confessions. A daughter wrestles with the cost of care as her mother begins to forget.

Against a backdrop of economic hardship, housing instability, cultural transition, and environmental loss, Carreira Ching writes with empathy about the complexities of identity, family, and belonging. His characters live in a Hawai'i far removed from tourist postcards, navigating grief, displacement, and intergenerational trauma. Still, in the overlooked corners of the islands, they hold tight to the connections that root them in community.

Blood Work and Other Stories showcases Donald Carreira Ching's remarkable range and emotional insight, securing his place as one of the most compelling voices writing from and about Hawai'i today. Through formally inventive and emotionally resonant storytelling, Carreira Ching captures the tension, beauty, and fragility of a community in transition. These are stories of what we carry, what we inherit, and what we leave behind.

Donald Carreira Ching was born and raised in Kahalu'u on the island of Oʻahu, Hawaiʻi. He earned his PhD in English from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. In 2015, his novel Between Sky and Sea: A Family's Struggle was published by Bamboo Ridge Press. In 2017, he was awarded the Elliot Cades Award for Literature. He is an Assistant Professor of Writing at Leeward Community College and recently completed a near-future eco-thriller, Hawaii 2038: The Bitter Storms. To learn more, visit donaldcarreiraching.com.

"Blood Work and Other Stories is an unflinching portrayal of Hawaiʻi's harshest realities, but grittiness does not mean pessimism. Rather, Carreira Ching writes with tenderness. Threats are rendered in complex, often heart-breaking reality, even as Carreira Ching navigates his characters, and his reader, toward community connection and hope. In formally inventive stories filled with intimacy and grace, Carreira Ching invites us to understand the Windward coast of Oʻahu as few other writers can." — Kristiana Kahakauwila, author of This is Paradise and Clairboyance

"In Blood Work and Other Stories, Hawai'i serves as both a sanctuary and a witness to lives shaped by loss, family bonds, and the fragile threads of culture. From a father searching for his daughter during the aftermath of a devastating flood in iconic Waikīkī to a young man searching for his motherʻs story through a VHS tape he finds after her passing, each story explores the quiet, sometimes heartbreaking struggle to keep aloha alive in a rapidly changing Hawai'i. What kept me reading was how intimate the stories felt to me, how grounded I felt reading from one story to the next." — Lisa Linn Kanae, author of Islands Linked by Ocean

"Carreira Ching's stories rise to touch the universality of the collective experiences we all face in Hawai'i, our nation, and at its essence, our world in chaos; our worlds of loss, addiction, alienation, crime, kūpuna, and climate change seen through the eyes of the writer's honesty and empathy—the quintessential intensity of bearing witness to catastrophic situations without judgment or shame, a release resounding with a generous pragmatic love." — Lois-Ann Yamanaka, author of Behold the Many and Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre

"Donald Carreira Ching presents a collective portrait in darker hues of the vacant spaces that once housed all we have lost in a single generation. Each story in this collection is crafted exquisitely and is haunted by the truth that we are a place in transition because we are a people in transition. Blood Work and Other Stories is a rare gem for those of us who like our fiction honest." — Scott Kikkawa, author of Kona Winds, Red Dirt, and Char Siu

"In Blood Work and Other Stories, Donald Carreira Ching presents readers with a series of finely etched characters navigating their way through the nightmares, challenges, and glories of a vividly captured contemporary Hawaiʻi. The result is a panoramic view of the islands, assembled out of character portraits displaying all of the subtleties, strengths, and formal mastery that the best short story collections have to offer." — Craig Howes, Professor of English and co-producer, Aloha Shorts, HPR 2009-2012

"Set against a backdrop fraught with meth abuse, domestic violence, land overdevelopment, mass exodus of locals, and U.S. military's continued intervention in the islands' political and natural landscape, Carreira Ching has written seventeen finely crafted, timely, and heart-rending stories." — R. Zamora Linmark, author of The Importance of Being Wilde at Heart