Darkness

Joan McGrath is a Toronto Board of Education library consultant.

A dozen deeply shadowed stories exploring the uneasy state of the expatriate are informed by the author’s own unhappy experiences as a member of the minority East Indian community in Canada. She sees and records a whole new underclass of “semi-assimilated” Indians living in an alien climate, of both weather and of mind: no longer citizens of their own native lands, yet not fully accepted by the new land; distanced not only from the generations of their forebears whom by emigrating they have forsaken, but also from the North American children they have begotten, whose lives, whose very world, is so vastly different from their own. These are disturbing stories, haunted and haunting. Some of them have appeared earlier in such journals as Saturday Night, The Canadian Forum, and others; two of the stories, “The World According to Hsu” and “Isolated Incidents,” have received major writing awards, and a third, “Angela,” has been selected for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories 1985.