His first, Soucouyant, published a decade ago, was shortlisted for a Governor General’s award. How can Caribbean immigrants become rooted in this time and place? Chariandy wonders. The costs were high then and they remain high now. It did not occur to them that they were moving from a rock to a hard place that they were part of a centuries-old voyage that began with Africans forced across the Atlantic into slavery, and Indians who crossed the Kala Pani-the metaphorical dark waters beyond the subcontinent-into lives of indentured servitude peoples travelling not only from one setting to another but through a cruel history. They believed they would be able to provide their children with enormous opportunities. Michael studies her for clues to who he is and where he is from.īrother describes a cohort of Caribbean immigrants who settled in Toronto in the 1960s and ’70s. Ruth serves as umbilical cord to the Caribbean and African past. And in Chariandy’s book, Ruth’s ferocious determination that her boys succeed contributes to Francis’s growing alienation from his family.

In her memoir Kincaid painstakingly analyzes her relationship with her controlling mother. But the reappearance of an old girlfriend forces Michael to contemplate the racism and police brutality that derailed his big brother’s life. Michael and Ruth keep to themselves, still traumatized by Francis’s violent death. The Toronto suburb is home to immigrants of colour, struggling to raise families on minimum wage jobs. The boys’ parents are Trinidadian: their mother, Ruth is black their absent father, South Asian. He cares for their mother in the same gray, dilapidated Scarborough, Ontario, complex in which they were raised. The narrator, Michael, is Francis’s 20-something brother. When the story opens, Francis has been dead 10 years. So, too, it is with Chariandy’s new novel, in which an air of mystery surrounds the narrator’s older brother, Francis, especially the nature of his relationship with his best friend. It’s a story about loss, the waste of potential, and how those we love best can remain a mystery. Kincaid’s memoir unfolds in an Antigua of economic despair where opportunities for young people are scarce. In the book she writes that she is surprised to learn that despite her brother’s sexual bravado in the company of women, he privately pursued intimate friendships with men. My Brother is Kincaid’s account of her younger sibling’s battle with AIDS. It is no coincidence that Brother, the title of David Chariandy’s new novel, is similar to that of the memoir by Jamaica Kincaid.

Novel brother by david chariandy