Description
Winner of the Guyanna Prize, Fiction, 2006
Longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, 2007
Finalist for the Ottawa Book Awards, English Fiction, 2006
In a central park in Ottawa's Sandy Hill, Gabe, an immigrant from Guyana (South America), explores the past in the company of his young Canadian-born daughter. But this novel goes beyond the traditional innocence to reality plot, as it also embraces a quest for spiritual beingness in a compelling setting fraught with irony. Grounds shift as characters come fully to life; tropical and temperate zones merge; the past and present form intermittent shadows. Gabe's story of growing up in an Indian family struggling to live traditionally in faraway Guyana, and Christian, Hindu and Muslim worlds come together, as the plot unravels, and we continually move back and forth faced with new realities, new awakenings.
About the author
Cyril Dabydeen has published more than a dozen books of prose and poetry in the United Kingdom and Canada, including the novel Dark Swirl and the story collections My Brahmin Days, Black Jesus and Other Stories, and Jogging in Havana. The City of Ottawa appointed him Poet Laureate in the mid-1980s and granted him the first Award of Excellence for Writing and Publishing. He lives in Ottawa, Ontario.
Editorial Reviews
". . . a beautifully rendered, intellectually challenging, and deeply satisfying addition to Dabydeen's oeuvre." --Dr Anne-Marie Lee-Loy, Ryerson University
Other titles by
My Undiscovered Country
Short Stories
My Multi-Ethnic Friends & Other Stories
Beyond Sangre Grande
Caribbean Writing Today
Writing the Terrain
Travelling Through Alberta with the Poets
Hemisphere of Love
poems
North of the Equator
My Brahmin Days
and other stories
Another Way to Dance
Contemporary Asian Poetry from Canada and the United States