The Worlds Within Her

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

Over three decades ago, Yasmin was the pampered only child of a
brilliant young Caribbean politician and an aloof Anglophile mother.
Yasmin’s privileged world suddenly ended when her father was brutally
assassinated on a deserted country road and her mother abandoned their
homeland and extended family to flee to Canada. Now, more than 30 years
later, Yasmin has returned to the land of her birth for the first time
since her father’s death. In her luggage are the cremated remains of
her mother, Shakti, whose death has released Yasmin from her filial
obligations but also left her stranded between two worlds. As Yasmin
revisits the scenes of her childhood, she is tormented by conflicting
images of both her past and her identity.

This intriguing tale is deftly told through the competing voices of
Yasmin, the middle-aged Canadian daughter, and Shakti, the elderly
Caribbean/South Asian mother. The mother–daughter tension between
Shakti and Yasmin plays out over a span of three decades. For most of
Yasmin’s life, Shakti refuses to discuss the past with her daughter;
for the reader, full disclosure takes place when Shakti reveals her
every thought to Mrs. Livingstone, an elderly friend who lies comatose
in a nursing home. Our sympathies are in a state of constant flux as new
details concerning Yasmin’s complex and multilayered family come to
light. Bissoondath is a first-rate storyteller, and this book is one of
his best.