Scarborough is a novel by Catherine Hernandez released in 2017 by Arsenal Pulp Press, in Vancouver, British Columbia. Scarborough was named co-winner of the 2015 Asian-Canadian Writers Workshop Emerging Writers Award for fiction. It was shortlisted for the Toronto Book Awards, Evergreen Forest of Reading Awards, Edmund White Awards for Debut Fiction, Trillium Book Awards, and the 2016 Half the World Global Literati Award worth $50,000 for the best unpublished manuscript. Scarborough was also longlisted for the 2018 Canada Reads. The novel is scheduled to be adapted into a motion picture produced by Telefilm Canada, Reel Asian Film Festival, and Compy Films.
The novel is set in an actual inner city known as Scarborough in Canada. Scarborough is a low-income and multicultural neighborhood on the east side of Toronto. The novel tells its story through a multitude of minority voices (consisting of natural-born citizens, naturalized citizens, First Nations, and immigrants) going through everyday life in a chaotic environment full of poverty, drugs, crime, and social distress. The characters are faced with—and often, but not always, overcome—trials and tribulations that take place against this multicultural background of Scarborough. Sadaf Ahsan of the National Post wrote, “Scarborough is a cultural amalgamation, connected by people from all walks of life in search of a better life than the one they had in their old country.”
Hernandez has spoken frequently about the difficulties she experienced while bringing the novel to fruition: “In late 2015, I was given the Asian Canadian Writers' Workshop Emerging Writer's Award for the unpublished manuscript. The momentum from this award would be fleeting and I had to start shopping it around to potential publishers as soon as possible. That's when I was diagnosed with Adrenal Fatigue, and I started to see signs I had to withdraw from topical steroid use…I asked Governor General Award-nominated playwright Donna-Michelle St. Bernard to help me edit. To be clear, I had small windows of time where I was pain-free and not high on painkillers. Oh yes, and there was the entire complication around the fact that I am a home daycare owner and mother to a tween. So that gave me a whopping 30 minutes a day to write something that I hoped would be spared from a publisher's recycling bin. Based on Donna-Michelle's input, I would wipe baby bums and rewrite passages in my head. I would put down toddlers for naps and reconsider character arcs. Then when my day was over and before my next round of painkillers, I would write for 30 blessed and beautiful minutes. My mentor Jim Wong-Chu advised me that before I could show the manuscript to publishers, I had to rework its ending. I thought this was impossible — I could barely speak a complete sentence, let alone consider such drastic changes. But then it happened. It was nighttime. I was already high on medication, sitting outside of my house in the middle of the winter to cool down my inflammation. I came inside and told my loving partner, Nazbah Tom, the new ending. ‘I need you to remember what I told you. I can't remember all of this.’ Nazbah did this over and over again, this remembering things for me and telling me when I was sober and pain-free.”
Reviews were positive. Booklist extolled the novel as “raw yet beautiful, disturbing yet hopeful. And though it often feels relentless in its bleakness, it also gives voice to people whose stories are often unheard, making this an important book that deserves a wide audience." The Toronto Book Awards jury said, “Rooted from within the worldview and place it portrays, Scarborough is an intimate portrait of a community with all its nuances and desires deftly captured. Through this novel, Hernandez invites us to engage in both the subtle and the sharp, the ordinary and the extraordinary; which, at its best, is what Toronto is all about. Brick by brick, life by life, Scarborough delivers an orchestral impact, one small, beautiful voice at a time."
