Brother

Winner of the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, Toronto Book Award, and the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize Longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize

Named a Best Book of the Year by Globe and Mail, National Post, Guardian, Esquire, New York Public Library, NOW Magazine, Chatelaine, CBC, Quill & Quire, Toronto Star, Montreal Gazette, Kirkus Reviews, and more A Canada Reads Finalist A Penguin Book Club Pick Now an acclaimed film directed by Clement Virgo and starring Lamar Johnson, and Aaron Pierre Winner of the 2017 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, David Chariandy's Brother is his intensely beautiful, searingly powerful, and tightly constructed second novel, exploring questions of masculinity, family, race, and identity as they are played out in a Scarborough housing complex during the sweltering heat and simmering violence of the summer of 1991. With shimmering prose and mesmerizing precision, David Chariandy takes us inside the lives of Michael and Francis. They are the sons of Trinidadian immigrants, their father has disappeared and their mother works double, sometimes triple shifts so her boys might fulfill the elusive promise of their adopted home. Coming of age in The Park, a cluster of town houses and leaning concrete towers in the disparaged outskirts of a sprawling city, Michael and Francis battle against the careless prejudices and low expectations that confront them as young men of black and brown ancestry--teachers stream them into general classes; shopkeepers see them only as thieves; and strangers quicken their pace when the brothers are behind them. Always Michael and Francis escape into the cool air of the Rouge Valley, a scar of green wilderness that cuts through their neighbourhood, where they are free to imagine better lives for themselves. Propelled by the pulsing beats and styles of hip hop, Francis, the older of the two brothers, dreams of a future in music. Michael's dreams are of Aisha, th