From our acclaimed poet and novelist: a gem of a novel that sizzles about love—between lovers, between friends, and for the places we live in—and pays homage to each moment of experience.
Love lasted only one year but the time felt like several springs strung together.

In Love Enough, the sharp beauty of Brand's writing draws us effortlessly into the intersecting stories of her characters caught in the middle of choices, apprehensions, fears. Each of the tales here—June's, Bedri's, Da'uud's, Lia's opens a different window on the city they all live in, mostly in parallel, but occasionally, delicately, touching and crossing one another. Each story radiates other stories. In these pages, the urban landscape cannot be untangled from the emotional one; they mingle, shift and cleave to one another.
The young man Bedri experiences the terrible isolation brought about by an act of violence, while his father, Da'uud, casualty of a geopolitical conflict, driving a taxi, is witness to curious gestures of love and anger; Lia faces the sometimes unbridgeable chasms of family; and fierce June, ambivalent and passionate with her string of lovers, now in middle age discovers: "There is nothing universal or timeless about this love business. It is hard if you really want to do it right." Brand is our greatest observer—of actions, of emotions, of the little things that often go unnoticed but can mean the turn of a day. At once lucid and dream-like, Love Enough is a profoundly modern work that speaks to the most fundamental questions of how we live now.

Dionne Brand is internationally known for her poetry, fiction, and essays. She has received many awards, notably the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, the Trillium Award (Land to Light On), 1997), the Pat Lowther Award (Thirsty, 2005), the City of Toronto Book Award (What We All Long For, 2006), and the Harbourfront Festival Award (2006), given in recognition of her substantial contribution to literature. She is a professor in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph.

Leslie C. Sanders is a professor at York University, where she teaches African American and Black Canadian literature. She is the author of The Development of Black Theatre in America, the editor of two volumes of Langston Hughes’s performance works, and a general editor of the Collected Works of Langston Hughes. She has written essays on African American and Black Canadian literature.

Dionne Brand's profile page

• Short-listed, Trillium Book Award

"Brand has two gifts that are incendiary in combination: a concise and intelligent grasp of the subtleties of emotion and an apparently effortless facility with language. The result is an extraordinary ability to capture the flicker of experience." —The Globe and Mail
"Using potent poetic language, Brand weaves these characters' stories—they often brush up against each other—into a powerful narrative. All yearn to liberate themselves from problematic relationships. . . . In Love Enough, our city seethes with love, pain, triumph and tragedy. Nobody writes about Toronto like Brand." —Susan G. Cole, NOW (Toronto)
"Love Enough is a series of surrealist sketches, a gentle, eloquent, insightful collection of souls and circumstances, brimming with passion and politics and shimmering glimpses of forgiveness. . . . Love Enough is clearly the work of a writer who knows and is faithful to her enormous talent for observation and storytelling." —Lesley Hughes, Winnipeg Free Press
"[Love Enough] moves its characters through its urban setting as a means of shedding light on the dark and desolate aspects of life. . . . In her novel’s overlapping structure, Brand has carved out distinct space for her dynamic characters to breathe.” —Safa Jinje, Quill & Quire