Michael recounts another time when he and Francis are young. Like many mothers in the Park, Ruth works as hard as she can to raise children who have a little more opportunity than she did. Ruth doesn’t admit that the boys’ father left years ago and that she never had the time or money to complete her nurse training. She admits she envies how Ruth got away to have a perfect life in Canada. There are dirt roads and no street lights, and they brush their teeth from an outdoor cold tap.Īfter meeting cousins and aunts and uncles, they leave, their mother’s sister joining them for the car ride to the airport. The air is thick with the scent of mud and dung and flowers. With devastating emotional force David Chariandy, a unique and exciting voice in Canadian literature, crafts a heartbreaking and timely story about the profound love that exists between brothers and the senseless loss of lives cut short with the shot of a gun.Michael recalls when he and Francis were very young and their mother took them to the place she was born: an impoverished village in the middle of Trinidad called Ste. But the bright hopes of all three are violently, irrevocably thwarted by a tragic shooting, and the police crackdown and suffocating suspicion that follow. Michael's dreams are of Aisha, the smartest girl in their high school whose own eyes are firmly set on a life elsewhere. Propelled by the pulsing beats and styles of hip hop, Francis, the older of the two brothers, dreams of a future in music.

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. 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. 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. With shimmering prose and mesmerizing precision, David Chariandy takes us inside the lives of Michael and Francis. Summary: 'Literary 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.

Brother by david chariandy sparknotes