It is also an act of literary cartography, an attempt to place Scarborough on the CanLit map, once and for all, and an effort by Chariandy to show 'the importance of knowing that your world – in its beauty, in its ugliness, in its heroism, in its cowardice – also be worthy of representation.'īrother tells the story of Michael and his older sibling, Francis, who live with their mother in an area of the city known as The Park. It is a celebration and a reckoning, a study of community and of family and of the ways each relies on the other, and of the power of art to build and the ability of those in power to destroy. The fact that, last Monday, it was named to the Scotiabank Giller Prize long list was one of the least-surprising developments of the week. My neighbourhood – this whole borough – was not worthy, except in bloody newspaper headlines.' He continues: 'To read a novel, or anything, set in Scarborough – and affirming that there is life in this part of the city – I think that would have been transformative.'Ĭhariandy's second novel, Brother, which arrives in bookstores on Tuesday, is a supremely moving and exquisitely crafted portrait of his hometown. My experiences were not worthy of representation. My parents were not worthy of representation.

'There was a very powerful sense that it was not worthy of representation – none of my life. 'And yet I consumed it – I guess because reading became a way of entering different worlds.'īut as he read more widely, venturing into other, different worlds – each one a magical portal, his own wardrobe – Chariandy rarely, if ever, encountered a world resembling his own: the apartment buildings and strip malls, the busy streets and hidden valleys, the sights and smells and tongues that he saw and heard and experienced every day in Scarborough. What is the term Harper used? Old-stock Canadian?' He laughs. Although he resembled a wizard himself, Davies was the Upper Canada College- and Oxford-educated bard of Canada's WASP-y establishment – a writer, Chariandy notes, who 'couldn't be farther from me in terms of experience. This introduced Chariandy, the son of Trinidadian immigrants living on the eastern edge of Scarborough, to a world as different from his own as Middle-earth.

When David Chariandy was a teenager, a self-described nerd who mostly read sci-fi novels and sword-and-sorcery epics, he discovered the work of Robertson Davies.

Novel brother by david chariandy