It's difficult to capture the slow-burning sense of alienation that someone can feel within family life, but in “Brother” David Chariandy powerfully depicts the story of a working class mother and her two sons in a way that gives a fully rounded sense of this. Michael lives with his grieving and fragile mother in a tower block in Scarborough, a district of Toronto with a high immigrant population. He still sleeps in the bunk bed of his childhood, but now the top bunk is empty and gradually we discover what happened to his absent brother Francis over the course of the novel. Michael struggles to get enough shift work at his low-paid job and spends the bulk of his time caring for his mentally-precarious mother. They are both haunted by a sense of loss and penned in by their circumstances. What's so beautiful about Chariandy's narrative is how he subtly captures the sense of a family who essentially loves and cares for each other, but whose status as West Indian immigrants has made them into perpetual outsiders and these internalized feelings make them unknown even to each other.

Michael relates the story of growing up in the shadow of his old brother Francis who is more socially adept and desirable. I found it particularly heartbreaking how Michael never really feels inadequate until it's pointed out to him by Francis coaching him in how to act or dress or when someone in their circle expresses resentment about Michael's presence. This builds to a sense of self consciousness that's formed from being continuously reminded that he doesn't fit in. Yet there are aspects of Francis' identity which never allow him to fully fit in either and parts of himself he perpetually hides. Most of all the boys economic and ethnic status contribute to their slow realization that they can never fully feel a part of the community that they've grown up in. There's such a striking moment early on in the novel when the brothers watch a television through a shop window. It's showing news report about street violence and while they're watching they can see their own reflections superimposed over the screen. This gives a powerful, haunting sense of how they are trapped in a community troubled by poverty and gang wars.

The family's neighbour Aisha was able to progress onto university, but she returns when her father dies and subsequently helps Michael care for his mother. Unfortunately for Michael and many other people in this immigrant community there are few ways to progress into a life with economic security or escape the perpetual sense of disenfranchisement. At one point in Michael's life he realizes “We were losers and neighbourhood schemers. We were the children of the help, without futures. We were, none of us, what our parents wanted us to be. We were not what any other adults wanted us to be. We were nobodies, or else, somehow, a city.” The novel gradually unfurls the multiple ways this comes to define Michael's life and the tragic way he doesn't fully understand his brother until he's lost.

Michael and Francis, brothers living in a community that is not well-off, on the outskirts of town, are the sons of an absent father and a mother who has to overwork so that they can survive, are struggling. They get in trouble, lots. They throw parties, play loud music, escape into the valley, pass out and start again. It's hard when you're up against prejudice from police and the rest of the town. Tragedy strikes, I don't want to spoil it, but life was never going to be easy here.

This is a beautifully written and constructed novel. It's hard to believe that so much can be said in so few pages. The characters are unforgettable and their relationships leap off the pages and into your neighbourhoods. It's vivid, emotional and a powerful story.

I was sad to finish this, and will look out for more from this author.

4.5★
“You’ve got to be cooler about things, and not put everything out on your face all the time. You’ve got to carry yourself better and think about your look. Doesn’t matter how poor you are. You can always turn up the edge of a collar to style a bit, little things like that. You can always do things to let the world know you’re not nobody. You never know when your break is coming.”

Brother. Big brother to little brother. This could have been a quote from “Grease”, couldn’t it? But these brothers are immigrants from Trinidad, trying to fit in in Canada, specifically the Park in Scarborough, outside Toronto. Multi-cultural doesn’t begin to describe the community here. Nobody belongs. Everybody belongs.

Michael tells us his story himself, which makes it very personal and made me feel like apologising for the dreadful treatment so many migrants face.

“The world around us was named Scarborough. It had once been called “Scarberia,” a wasteland on the outskirts of a sprawling city. But now, as we were growing up in the early ’80s, in the heated language of a changing nation, we heard it called other names: Scarlem, Scarbistan. We lived in Scarbro, a suburb that had mushroomed up and yellowed, browned, and blackened into life.”

We learn right away that something happened to the older brother ten years earlier and that Mother has never really recovered. The story moves back and forth between today and childhood and youth. The boys’ father left the picture early, and Mother is sadly familiar from other migrant stories.

“All around us in the Park were mothers who had journeyed far beyond what they knew, who took day courses and worked nights, who dreamed of raising children who might have just a little more than they did, children who might reward sacrifice and redeem a past.”

When the boys were still young, she left them home alone with strict instructions while she went to work the night shift.

‘Just answer that front door once. I will string you up by your thumbnails from the ceiling. I will skin you alive and screaming. I will beat you so hard your children will bear scars. Your children’s children will feel!’”

They ate their food after she left and then . . . went wandering. Freedom!

I know an old Croatian lady where I live in regional Australia, and she tells me proudly how when she was a young refugee widow here, she worked three different cooking jobs to raise her two little girls. She criticises today’s young people for wanting welfare because she got off her backside and managed without it. They are lazy. There are jobs there if they’re willing to work. Sound familiar?

But, she left the girls home alone, at night, while she went to work, and when I told her that you’re not allowed to do that today, she basically scoffed. I have a feeling she would do the same thing today despite the law if she were in the same circumstances.

I do think that’s a lot of the problem regarding welfare and equality and the common complaint of older people that anyone can get a job if they just try hard enough. Not alone with little kids, you can’t. Mostly, we’re expected to be with our children whenever they aren’t in school or some kind of care. And of course all parents aren’t equally intelligent and resourceful either.

But I digress.

Francis was the old brother who loved music and hanging out with mates from many countries at Desirea’s, a local barber shop. This reminded me strongly of the classic Jayber Crow, where the men gathered in exactly the same way, to be part of a “family”. The more we think cultures are different, the more they are the same (a slight alteration of the French saying).

“Our parents had come from Trinidad and Jamaica and Barbados, from Sri Lanka and Poland and Somalia and Vietnam. They worked s**t jobs, struggled with rent, were chronically tired, and often pushed just as chronically tired notions about identity and respectability. But in Desirea’s, different styles and kinships were possible. You found new language, you caught the gestures, you kept the meanings close as skin.”

Mother was told that Desirea’s is where the undesirables and law-breakers hang out and had plenty to say about it.

“‘You don’t listen!’ she might shout at us. ‘You all don’t pay attention to what I tell you. You all is HARDEN! Too too HARDEN.’ If we ever hurt ourselves, she would promise to ‘corn our backsides.’ She vowed to whip the life force back into us if ever through sheer foolishness we cut ourselves and shamefully bled our lives away.”

Also sound familiar? Parents everywhere swear that if you break your neck on that bike/horse/mountain I’ll KILL you!

Unfortunately, Mother was right, and they should have stayed away from Desirea’s.

There was one place where they enjoyed some peace and nature, The Rouge. This is a big conservation area, and the boys and even Mother used to wander down the valley to cool off. The boys played and built things with sticks, as kids do. Michael makes a point of saying it’s not David Attenborough country, but it served them well.

“The Rouge Valley. It was a wound in the earth. A scar of green running through our neighbourhood, hundreds of feet deep in some places, a glacial valley that existed long before anything called Scarborough.”

The story of the boys, Mother, Aisha and the other kids is hauntingly real and the author tells it well. It may not be new, but it sounds personal, sad, and angry.

Thanks to NetGalley and Bloomsbury for the preview copy from which I’ve quote so much. It’s well worth reading, and if you want a first-hand opinion, read some reviews by people who have lived there themselves.

The failure of the dream... 5 stars

A young man goes to meet an old friend who is returning to visit the neighbourhood where she grew up and he still lives. Aisha's visit prompts Michael to think back to his childhood and teen years in the 1980s, when he and his older brother Francis were being brought up by their mother, an immigrant to Canada from Trinidad whose husband had deserted her when the boys were young. She is strict with the boys, with the usual immigrant dream that they will make successful lives in this society that is new to her. But she has to struggle hard to make ends meet, working several jobs, often having to leave the boys alone and usually exhausted when she finally gets home. So the boys, good at heart, have too many opportunities to drift into the 'wrong' crowd. When they are caught up in an incident of street violence, it begins a chain of events that will ultimately lead to tragedy.

This is a short book with no unnecessary padding, and its brevity makes it all the more powerful. It's a story of how the immigrant dream can go wrong, but it's not overtly hammering polemics at the reader nor too heavily making a 'point'. I found it eye-opening, though, because I'd never really thought of Canada as having the kind of immigrant neighbourhoods described so vividly in the book.

Chariandy brings the neighbourhood of Scarborough to life, showing it as a place where a constant influx of immigrants from different countries around the world first settle when they arrive in Canada, seeing their life there as a stage on the road to either them or their children one day making it in their new world and moving on to more desirable areas. The city of which the neighbourhood is a suburb is, I think, Toronto, but really it could be any big city, in almost any Western country. There is poverty here, both financial and of expectations, and there's the violence and insecurity that usually goes with that; and the exploitation of these incomers as a ready supply of cheap and disposable labour by unscrupulous employers. But Chariandy also shows the kindness that can exist among people when they all face the same problems and share the same dreams.

I found the portrait of the neighbourhood utterly believable, drawn without the exaggerated over-dramatisation that often infests books about the failure of the immigrant dream, making them feel like an unnuanced and often unfair condemnation of the host nation. Although this book centres on a tragedy, Chariandy also allows the reader to see hope – to believe that for some, the dream is indeed possible to attain; and this has a double effect – it stops the book from presenting a picture of unrelenting despair, and it makes the events even more tragic because they don't feel as if they were inevitable.

There's also a short section of the boys and their mother visiting Trinidad – her home, but a new country to them, full of relatives they've never met and a lifestyle that is as foreign to them as Canada is to their mother. Again beautifully done, Chariandy shows the freshness of the immigrant dream through the eyes of the Trinidadian relatives, who assume that the mother's life in Canada is one of comfort and ease in comparison to their own, while the reader has seen the reality of constant days of struggle, hard, poorly-paid work and exhaustion.

An excellent novel, insightful, beautifully written, and with some wonderfully believable characterisation. And happily, unlike too much Canadian literature, available in the UK! Highly recommended.

NB This book was provided for review by the publisher, Bloomsbury Publishing.

Brother was rather confusing for me. The book explores grief and how different people mourn the same loss. However, I could not make out a proper order of the story. I could not tell if certain scenes were flashbacks or if I was meant to be in the present time with the character. For this reason, I could not get myself to really immerse into the story.

The book introduces readers to two brothers; Francis and Michael. The story follows how they grew up and apart, how living in the outskirts of town in a neighbourhood where no one expects you to succeed affect their way of thinking and the decisions they make on the person they choose to be. Being the two sons of immigrants from Trinidad, life is hard for them from the very beginning. The story follows detailed encounters and observations of the neighbourhood from the two brothers' eyes.

Like every child, Francis had his own dream. He wanted to pursue a career in music with his close friend, Jelly. However, because of who he was and who he was perceived to be, that dream was shattered once a fight broke moments after their audition. To quote the book; "We're all just dreaming," Francis said. "It wasn't ever going to work." It's heartbreaking to see someone's spirit falling apart the way Francis's did.

Brother also tells a story of how a mother works day and night for her two sons, as well as making sure they behave well... A mother who constantly fears for her children's safety, always telling her sons to avoid doing things that would set anything off, to always obey the authority or they might get hurt. And how she failed one of them, how she couldn't save Francis even when she had warned her sons time and time again.

In this book, Michael, Francis's younger brother narrates the story. He recollects memories of when Francis was alive and how everything between them had slowly changed as they grew older. Michael tells readers how his mother was grieving, and how he too, was mourning the loss of his brother and was, if I got it right, in his own way, seeking a closure.

All in all, this was a very brief but poignant read. I would like to thank Net Galley and Bloomsbury for giving me the opportunity to read and review this.

Brother is an emotional read, not least because, from the outset, the reader has a sense of inevitability that promising lives will be unfulfilled or end tragically. Danger seems always close at hand in the area where the family live. ‘Always, there were stories on TV and in the papers of gangs, killings in bad neighbourhoods, predators roaming close.’ The relationship between the two brothers is beautifully rendered, with Francis acting as protector and guide to his younger brother. There is also a strong sense of the bonds of loyalty to your family, your friends - your 'group', as it were. Ultimately the latter will lead to tragedy.

The book evokes a believable picture of the immigrant experience in Canada (and I suspect many other places). It’s a world of poor housing and low level, insecure jobs where multiple jobs may be needed to make ends meet. However, there is comfort to be found in cultural reminders (food, music, etc.) and in community support in times of crisis. ‘To this very day, trays of food will sometimes appear at our front door. A pilau with okra, a stew chicken unmistakably Caribbean.’

Like many others, Michael’s and Francis’s mother dreams of a better future for her children, fighting prejudice, social inequality and low expectations. ‘All around us in the Park were mothers who had journeyed far beyond what they knew, who took day courses and worked nights, who dreamed of raising children who might just have a little more than they did, children who might reward sacrifice and redeem a past....Fears were banished by the scents from simmering pots, denigration countered by a freshly laundered tablecloth. History beaten back by the provision of clothes and yearly school supplies. “Examples” were raised.’

Brother – sadly - tells a story that is probably being played out in many of our communities right now. It’s a relatively short book but one that packs an emotional punch.

I thought this was a really powerful novel about family and the ties between siblings. Stories about how the children of immigrants navigate the world they live in and this book is no exception; it’s both heartbreaking and thought-provoking to see characters with such potential strive to succeed despite the odds stacked against them and the tragedy at the centre of the story really highlights the struggles of non-white immigrants within white countries.

3.5ish/4 stars.

I thought that this was quite good. I loved how it focused on not only a family, but a community too. The area where this is set is inhabited by a lot of immigrants from different places and their children. They come from all parts of the world but they all make up one community now. What I loved was that sense of lots of different cultures being integrated into the community. I'm from a rural Irish town so everyone I know here is Irish and there aren't other cultures celebrated around here. I think that's why I loved that aspect so much. A bit I found really beautiful was quite a simple thing; when the family are grieving, dishes are left at their front door for them and Michael mentions how some of the dishes are unfamiliar to him. I just thought that that really reiterated how there were all these different cultures at work in this one community. I also loved that sense of community Chariandy created. It highlighted that it doesn't matter where you're from or what race you are, we are all human, we are all the same and we all deserve to be treated accordingly.

I liked the family dynamic that was at play. I thought that it was so authentic, the family and each individual character seemed so real to me. I also really liked the writing and the tone of the book. It was very refreshing and it was felt quite unique. The only problems I had was that it didn't completely reel me in and I just don't think it's will end up being very memorable for me.

I would recommend this & I would read more by David Chariandy.

* I received a copy from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Heartbreakingly beautiful.



This book is incredible. An extremely emotional, powerful, evocative and heart-rending piece of prose. Yes, I'm an emotional mess now. But really, guys, what a great book, and what a talented author. It was worth every single tear. Hats off.