'A brilliant, powerful elegy from a living brother to a lost one, yet pulsing with rhythm, and beating with life' Marlon James, Winner of the Man Booker Prize

WINNER OF THE ROGERS WRITERS' TRUST FICTION PRIZE

WINNER OF THE TORONTO BOOK AWARD

LONGLISTED FOR THE SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE

A GUARDIAN BOOK OF THE YEAR

Michael and Francis are the bright, ambitious sons of Trinidadian immigrants. Coming of age in the outskirts of a sprawling city, the brothers battle against careless prejudices and low expectations.

While Francis aspires to a future in music, Michael dreams of Aisha, the smartest girl in their school, whose eyes are firmly set on a life elsewhere. But one sweltering summer night the hopes of all three are violently, irrevocably cut short.

In this timely and essential novel, David Chariandy builds a quietly devastating story about the love between a mother and her sons, the impact of race, masculinity and the senseless loss of young lives.

In the tradition of Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me, acclaimed novelist David Chariandy's latest is an intimate and profoundly beautiful meditation on the politics of race today

'Quite simply, one of the most beautiful books I have ever read' AMINATTA FORNA

When a moment of quietly ignored bigotry prompted his three-year-old daughter to ask 'what happened?', David Chariandy began wondering how to discuss with his children the politics of race. Today, in a newly heated era of struggle and divisions, he has completed a letter to his now thirteen-year-old daughter.

The son of Black and South Asian migrants from Trinidad, David draws upon his personal and ancestral past, including his experiences growing up as a 'visible minority' within the land of his birth, as well as the legacies of slavery, indenture and immigration.

In sharing with his daughter his own story of 'race', he hopes to cultivate within her a sense of identity that balances the painful truths of the past and present with hopeful possibilities for a better future. With intimacy, sensitivity and beauty, Chariandy shares the questions he is addressing to his daughter - questions of immense importance and resonance for us all.

A "soucoyant" is an evil spirit in Caribbean lore, a reminder of past transgressions that refuse to diminish with age. In this beautifully told novel that crosses borders, cultures, and generations, a young man returns home to care for his aging mother, who suffers from dementia. In his efforts to help her and by turn make amends for their past estrangement from one another, he is compelled to re-imagine his mother's stories for her before they slip completely into darkness. In delicate, heartbreaking tones, the names for everyday things fade while at the same time a beautiful, haunted life, stained by grief, is slowly revealed.

Examining various cultural products-music, cartoons, travel guides, ideographic treaties, film, and especially the literary arts-the contributors of these thirteen essays invite readers to conceptualize citizenship as a narrative construct, both in Canada and beyond. Focusing on indigenous and diasporic works, along with mass media depictions of Indigenous and diasporic peoples, this collection problematizes the juridical, political, and cultural ideal of universal citizenship. Readers are asked to envision the nation-state as a product of constant tension between coercive practices of exclusion and assimilation. Narratives of Citizenship is a vital contribution to the growing scholarship on narrative, nationalism, and globalization. Contributors: David Chariandy, Lily Cho, Daniel Coleman, Jennifer Bowering Delisle, Aloys N.M. Fleischmann, Sydney Iaukea, Marco Katz, Lindy Ledohowski, Cody McCarroll, Carmen Robertson, Laura Schechter, Paul Ugor, Nancy Van Styvendale, Dorothy Woodman, and Robert Zacharias.