David Chariandy's Brother is a 2017 coming-of-age novel about Michael, a child of Trinidadian immigrants who struggles to come to terms with the police killing of his older brother.
Set in the Park, a low-income multicultural neighborhood in Scarborough, Ontario, Canada, the novel depicts Michael revisiting the trauma of his brother's death after Aisha, Michael's high-school girlfriend, comes to stay with him and his mother, Ruth. Overwhelmed by grief, Ruth's mental health has suffered since Francis's death, and Michael has dedicated the past decade of his life to looking after her. However, Aisha quickly perceives that both Ruth and Michael need to confront what happened if they ever want to move on from Francis's killing. Michael's narration cuts between this present-day frame and scenes from the past that show how Michael looked up to his brother, who was a stand-in male role model after their father abandoned them. Timid by nature, Michael learns from Francis the importance of appearing tough and cool—traits Michael tries to emulate. Francis also inculcates in his younger brother a caring and protective attitude toward their mother, who works long hours as a cleaner to support her sons and give them greater opportunities in life. When Francis drops out of school and begins hanging out with hip-hop enthusiasts at a barbershop, a rift divides him and Ruth, who doesn't want him associating with "criminals." Following an altercation with a bouncer who concusses him, Francis defies police authority and reaches to stop a cop from withdrawing his gun. Another officer fires on Francis, killing him in the barbershop where he had sought refuge from the world. By the end of the novel, Michael accepts Aisha's attempts at healing him and his mother.
Exploring themes of grief, denial, and acceptance, Brother is a poignant story about the difficulty of defining one's own identity in an atmosphere of violence and racial discrimination. The novel won the 2017 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and the 2018 Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. It was nominated for the 2017 Scotiabank Giller Prize, the 2019 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, the 2019 PEN Open Book Award, the 2019 CBC Canada Reads Nominee, and the 2019 Aspen Words Literary Prize.
