![]() ![]() The two main characters are brothers – Michael, who narrates the novel, and Francis, who we learn early on was shot and killed while a teenager. Quietly, Chariandy juxtaposes the violence and poverty of the community he describes (“The Park,” with its sagging lowrises and ethnic grocery stores) with characters who try their best to either cope with the limitations of their lives or strive to overcome them. The novel is interested in themes of masculinity in poor, visible minority communities where fathers or father figures aren’t always present and most encounters with authority are exercises in humiliation and emasculation.īut it is also a story of resilience. In Brother Chariandy, who is now a professor at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, looks back on the Scarbourough of his youth in the late 1980s and early nineties. ![]() ![]() Likewise, Brother was on this year’s Giller longlist before it was even published and is shortlisted for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Soucouyant was on the Scotiabank Giller Prize longlist and the Governor General’s Award shortlist in 2007. Brother is David Chariandy’s second novel and like his debut novel Soucouyant (2007) it is set in Scarborough, the multi-ethnic east Toronto suburb that Chariandy grew up in, described by the narrator of Brother as “a suburb that had mushroomed up and yellowed, browned, and blackened into life.” ![]()
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