In the fifteen stories in What You Are, M. G. Vassanji centres characters in the latter parts of their lives. Unlike Dylan Thomas’s exhortation not to “go gentle into that good night,” they do not rage but rather reflect, reminisce, and regret.

Many of the stories centre around people of Indian descent who have come from Dar es Salaam to North America, and especially to the Flemingdon Park and Thorncliffe Park communities in the east end of Toronto (though he starts out giving it a fictional name, it was very recognizable as I taught there for a number of years).

These are stories about confronting mortality, about asking whether you made the right choices in your early life, about how you got to where you are and where you might have been if you’d made a different choice. Eventually one of his narrators asks: “The world belongs to the young, when does one start seeing that? All of a sudden, the realization dawns without warning: it’s gone. It is their world now, just as it was ours once...” As a retiree in my late fifties, this one landed.

They are also about the immigrant experience. About what it is to make a home in a new place where you have been welcomed but are not necessarily accepted. About what it is to raise children, to look forward to their new experiences and backward to your own. Vassanji says: “Canada was wonderful and yet not always quite so wonderful.”

A powerful collection of stories, What You Are is poignant and deep. Highly recommend.

Thanks to Penguin Random House Canada, Doubleday Canada and NetGalley for this eARC in exchange for an honest review.