What We All Long for - Paperback

by Dionne Brand (Author)

Gripping at times, heartrending at others, What We All Long For is an ode to a generation of longing and identity, and to the rhythms and pulses of a city and its burgeoning, questioning youth.

Dionne Brand's multicultural infusion follows the stories of a close circle of twenty-something second-generations living in downtown Toronto--and the secrets they hide from their families.

Tuyen is a lesbian avant-garde artist and the daughter of Vietnamese parents who've never recovered from losing one of their children while in the rush to flee Vietnam in the 1970s. She rejects her immigrant family's hard-won lifestyle, and instead lives in a rundown apartment with friends--each of whom is grappling with their own familial complexities and heartache.

Tuyen is love with her best friend Carla, a biracial bicycle courier. Oku is a jazz-loving poet who, unbeknowst to his Jamaican-born parents, has dropped out of college. He is tormented by his unrequited love for Jackie, a gorgeous black woman who runs a hiphop clothing store.

Meanwhile, Tuyen's lost brother, Quy--now a criminal in the Thai underworld--sets out for Toronto to find his long-lost family.

Gripping at times, heart-wrenching at others, Dionne Brand's What We all Long For is a story of identity, love and loss--the universal experience of being human, and discovering the nature of our longing.

Front Jacket

A breakout novel for Dionne Brand: a story of heart-stopping suspense from the acclaimed author of At the Full and Change of the Moon, that is also a hymn to youth and life in the city.
What we all long for opens with an unforgettable scene: desperate Vietnamese families are fleeing the country in open boats. In the confusion and darkness, six-year-old Quy, carrying his family's life-savings of diamonds sewn into his belt, loses his grip on his mother's hand and, in the crush of people, follows the wrong pair of trousered legs into another boat. His family manages to get to Canada soon after, but Quy, trapped in the refugee camps in Thailand, is seemingly lost to them.
Some twenty years on in Toronto, in the summer of 2002, Quy's mother still lives in hope of finding him. Her daughter Tuyen, an aspiring artist, and her friends are typical Canadian kids getting by in the city -- afire with their desire for independence, they're selling used clothes, bike couriering, sponging off their parents. At night they blast John Coltrane and drum 'n' bass, get high and try to find the passion they believe will galvanize their lives. Meanwhile Quy, now a dangerous criminal, is finding his way to Canada and to a gripping, unexpected encounter with his lost family.
In this beautiful novel that is both a hymn to life in the city and to youth, the mounting tension of Quy's journey is skilfully played out against the rhythms and excitements of Toronto from the seventies to the present.
Excerpt From "What We All Long For
"The muscles of highway and streets met down at the lake. All along the underpasses graffiti marred the concrete girders. She recognized the tags. The kids who livedacross the alleyway from her apartment were graffiti artists. Kumaran's grinning pig, Abel's 'narc' initial, then Keeran's desert and Jericho's lightning bolt. She felt slightly comforted though she had asked them often enough to paint something else if they were going to paint the whole city over. Something more. They had practically filled all the walls of the city with these four signs, and she would have liked them to paint a flowering jungle or a seaside, the places where her mother Angie had always dreamed of going but never went. But she loved the city. She loved riding through the neck of it. . .She loved the feeling of weight and balance it gave her.

"From the Hardcover edition.

Author Biography

As a young girl growing up in Trinidad, DIONNE BRAND submitted poems to the newspapers under the pseudonym Xavier Simone, an homage to Nina Simone. She moved to Canada at age 17 and earned a degree in Philosophy and English, a Masters in the Philosophy of Education, and pursued PhD studies in Women's History but left the program to make time for creative writing.

Brand won the Governor General's Award for poetry and the Trillium Award in 1997 for Land to Light On. In 2003 she won the Pat Lowther Award for poetry for her book thirsty. Her novels include In Another Place, Not Here and At the Full and Change of the Moon. She lives in Toronto.