But like the protagonist in Brother, I grew up in a working-class immigrant family like the protagonist, I have a South Asian father and a black mother, and I grew up identifying and being read as black. “It’s first and foremost a work of fiction, both novels. “There is an autobiographical element, but it’s very complicated, I think,” he says. There are enough similarities to Chariandy’s own story that it seems natural to ask if his writing is essentially autobiographical-but the author, interviewed by telephone while taking a break in a Fairview Slopes park, cautions not to read too much into the parallels. In both, the brothers’ father is an absent, shadowy figure in both, the father is South Asian and the mother is of Afro-Caribbean descent both are set in Toronto’s Scarborough neighbourhood. In Soucouyant, their mother is suffering from dementia in Brother, she’s paralyzed by the even more common maladies of overwork and grief. A pair of brothers, different but similar, feature in both works in each, the narrator is bookish and observant where his sibling is streetwise and impulsive.

The world we’re initially introduced to bears resemblances to that of Chariandy’s first effort, the universally praised 2007 novel Soucouyant.

Look behind the realism of the initial premise and you’ll find successive layers of other worlds-each, paradoxically, larger than the first.

In his slim but perfectly proportioned second novel, Brother, David Chariandy has accomplished a kind of literary alchemy, creating a believable world in just 180 pages.

Brother by chariandy