This is a slim novel, yet Chariandy manages to encompass a world with astonishing detail and feeling inside it: the family’s acute poverty is conveyed particularly well and the sense of alienation it brings, such as when the family visit a shopping mall and are made to feel unwelcome: “As we moved from store to store, the clerks seemed especially attentive to us. Chariandy describes their hopes and desires: Francis’s ambitions to be a hip-hop artist, his gay desire, and Michael’s first relationship with a neighbour. Every chapter builds to the inevitability of this moment and is freighted with a great and awful fatalism.īrother is not just a study of Francis, but a dark bildungsroman about boys – who are part of a black underclass – turning into men. The sibling relationship is beautifully conveyed (Francis’s effortless popularity, his protectiveness, Michael’s adoration of Francis) and with such tenderness that Francis’s death is devastating when it comes. I’ve kept to a minimum all discomforting talk about the past.”

What is most poignant here is Michael’s memory of her as a fierce, strict mother with an indomitable spirit – a far cry from the broken woman she is now: “For the past 10 years, I’ve been careful with Mother. Michael’s mother shows signs of dementia too, or at least confusion brought on by grief. Memory played a big part in Chariandy’s debut, Soucouyant, about a mother suffering from dementia.

Michael is now 28 and the past replays in his mind in parallel chapters to the present day, in which he is caring for his mother and working gruelling hours in a storeroom.

We first meet Michael 10 years after Francis has lost his life, aged 19, and the story unravels backwards. They live with their Trinidadian-born single mother, who works as a cleaner in a run-down district of Toronto.

David chariandy