Two Toronto Novels: What We All Long For / Love Enough

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Together in a single volume, two beloved novels by one of our most celebrated and important writers.Tuyen is an aspiring 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.     By turns thrilling and heartbreaking, Tuyen’s lost brother—who has since become a criminal in the Thai underworld—journeys to Toronto to find his long-lost family. As Quy’s arrival nears, tensions build, friendships are tested, and an unexpected encounter will forever alter the lives of Tuyen and her friends. 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. Winner of the Toronto Book Award.____________ 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.” 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.

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