A Quiet Disappearance

Beautifully crafted stories in which older men and women from the Caribbean islands confront their pasts, with regrets and wonder as they discover subtle epiphanies. The stories consider the briefness of life, not only its final outcome but the losses accumulated over the years. Many of the stories focus on characters who are at a critical stage, approaching the end of their lives, or contemplating the passing of others with whom they shared a relationship. The fact that the characters are immigrants, complicates their feelings of forfeiture.

Rabindranath Maharaj is an award-winning author of several novels, among them The Amazing Absorbing Boy, winner of the Trillium Book Award and the Toronto Book Award; A Perfect Pledge, a Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize finalist; and Homer in Flight, a Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award finalist.

Maharaj immigrated to Canada from Trinidad in the 1990s, and settled in Ajax, Ontario, where he taught high school and co-founded a literary magazine, LICHEN. He has been a writer-in-residence at the Toronto Reference Library, the University of the West Indies, and the University of New Brunswick. Apart from his novels and collections of short stories, he has published in various literary journals and anthologies; written reviews and articles for The Washington Post, The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star, and others; written the radio series ＂Malcolm and Alvin＂ for CBC Radio; and co-written a screenplay for the film Malini.