In his later teens, though, he gets swept up in the burgeoning hip-hop DJ scene based out of a mall barbershop and starts to distance himself from Michael and their black Trinidadian mother, Ruth, who works unpredictable and long hours as a cleaner. Francis is street-smart, devastatingly handsome, tough-as-nails when threatened with a knife, he grabs it by the blade. Growing up in the Park in the eighties, Francis has always been protector to Michael, vulnerable because he possesses none of his older brother’s traits. One of the few to escape is Aisha, an ex-girlfriend of the narrator who went to Montreal on a scholarship and is referred to by local parents as “the exception” proving, of course, the rule. You couldn’t say they’re on the outside looking in since the inside-mainstream white society-is barely referred to or glimpsed except, perhaps, in the cops, “cold-eyed with purpose,” who, after a spate of shootings, undertake regular, intimidating sweeps of the neighbourhood. The novel’s characters also exist, needless to say, on the periphery. The “dull purple” sky that hangs over the Park is “the wasted light of a city.” Here, the sun arrives as plate-scrapings. A city’s suburbs are by definition on its outskirts, but what we feel in the Scarborough of Brotheris the connotive dig of the prefix “sub”: lesser than, subordinate. That sense of a parallel, fringe-dwelling world stays with us throughout the novel. The complex itself, a concrete jungle home to working-class immigrants from around the globe, is known as “the Park” its local store, “Heritage Value” Convenience, is “run by that asshole who framed his useless foreign degree, despised the dark, stinking guts of every other immigrant.” In the violence-prone suburban Toronto housing complex that serves as the setting for David Chariandy’s Writers’ Trust Prize-winning novel, the clustered, grim towers and low-rises-with names like the Waldorf, the Oberlin, the Rosedale-stand as mocking facsimile of a distant, glamorous world.

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