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Toronto Book Awards - 2006 |
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When She Was Queen
 by M.G. Vassanji
Doubleday Canada
This is vintage Vassanji. Richly detailed and full of vivid characters, these stories are worlds unto themselves, just as a dusty African street full of bustling shops is a world, and so is the small matrix of lives enclosed by an intimate Toronto neighbourhood. It is the smells and sentiments and small gestures that constitute life, and of these Vassanji is a master.
With the effortless narrative of traditional storytelling and a thoroughly modern sensibility that sets one moral code beside another this collection, like The In-Between World of Vikram Lall, is a portrait not only of Old and New Worlds, but of the very rich and real world that comprises both.
With his trademark assurance, Vassanji weaves haunting tales of extraordinary lives transplanted, of the traumas of migration, of the bitterness of memory and the ravages of hope. These characters will live with you long after the book has been read.
M.G. Vassanji
 M.G. Vassanji was born in Kenya and raised in Tanzania. Before coming to Canada in 1978, he attended M.I.T., and later was writer-in-residence at the University of Iowa. Vassanji is the author of five acclaimed novels, The Gunny Sack (1989), which won the regional Commonwealth Prize; No New Land (1991); The Book of Secrets (1994), which won the inaugural Giller Prize; Amriika (1999); and The In-Between World of Vikram Lall, which won the Giller Prize in 2003. His first collection of short stories was Uhuru Street. - Photo credit: Nora Vaillant
Excerpt from When She Was Queen - from the story "The Sky to Stop Us"
"No mean achievement that, rags to riches. They had done the immigrants' apartment route in Don Mills, gone hustling after cheap prices from one end of town to another, considered themselves fortunate to be consuming fast food and calories as a treat . . . all that, yet at work they hit the glass ceiling early on, she in a lawyer's office where a British accent and white skin meant you were visible and up front, while she was relegated to the dungeons of the archives, too reserved, to nervous to ask for more, for her right to opportunity; and he as a loan clerk in a bank downtown where the manager craved nothing more than to push him out, which he eventually did. But he, Nazir, a grocer's son, did two things right: he bought a cheap rental unit on Spadina when property there was dirt cheap, in partnership with three others, a Bengali and two Chinese, and just before real estate prices went boom in the eighties; and while at the bank he was smart enough to invest in the money market, watching how others made their fortunes. Then one day he told Almas, Love, you don't have to work for those sons of bitches, you stay home and bring up little Shaf here and that girl who's on the way. Where we're going there's only the sky to stop us, and if you recall your high school science, even the sky's an illusion. And he himself told his manager to piss off, to put it mildly. He sold off his portfolio for a huge profit; with his partners he renovated the property on Spadina, converted it into an international hostel, sold it. He was rolling. He bought a bigger hotel on the Don Valley that was badly managed and made it turn a profit; then sold it. He was growing; his partners were growing; Toronto was growing. And now to spurn that, for some sentimental reason, because he didn't have time to play baseball with the kids . . . or sit with them for dinner, because he was out there making sure his son had a Honda Civic to take to college and his fees would be paid at Harvard if he made it . . . which he didn't, but McGill wasn't so bad either."
From When She Was Queen by M.G. Vassanji. Published by Doubleday Canada. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
Read the Committee's comments on this book.
2006 short list:
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