A Word About Awards

THE ART OF LOSING by Alice Zeniter   Award: Dublin Winner 2022   Nomination: BookTube Finalist 2022   Date Read: April 17, 2024   From Kirkus Reviews: “What if the world identifies you as being something you don’t know anything about?   Naïma, a young French gallery worker, spends her days drifting between alcohol-fueled despair and bliss, unable to identify the nagging uncertainty about her roots that lurks at the edge of her consciousness. Born in France, the daughter of Hamid, an Algerian immigrant, and Clarisse, the daughter of a “traditional” French family, Naïma is aware of her Algerian identity but uninformed about its meaning (to herself and to the rest of the world) primarily due to her father’s purported lack of any memories about his early childhood years. After terrorist attacks in France, unspoken, but not unfelt, worries about the perception of darker skinned “Arab” residents prompt Naïma to wonder what others think of her and of her elderly Algerian grandmother. An oppor

BROTHER by David Chariandy   Nominations: Aspen Words Finalist 2019, Dublin Longlist 2019, PEN/Open Book Longlist 2019   Date Read: April 2, 2024   From Kirkus Reviews: “A novel about the indignities, frustrations, and joy found in a Toronto public housing complex.    The Park is a sprawling complex home to thousands of residents struggling to find work, take care of each other, and get through another day. Like so many of the Park’s residents, Michael and Francis are the children of an immigrant single mother. Ruth came from Trinidad with dreams of becoming a nurse; instead, she’s working multiple jobs, riding buses for hours, and coming home too exhausted to even sleep. Michael and Francis are learning how to survive in the Park as young men. They know how to posture, which guys to avoid, and how to act when the police roll through. Chariandy’s second novel (Soucouyant, 2007) is a slender volume with the heart of a family epic. Alternating between Michael and Francis’ teenage years a