small life

A globe-spanning jigsaw puzzle of a novel about what it is to be human during this nervous, catastrophic moment in time.

Dionne Brand’s brief, powerful small life has the dazzling, hypnotic rhythm of a series of waves, tossing together multiple narrators and stories in time and space. The novel works through affective momentum, through gathering velocity, through multiplying and quickening voices and stories. None of these vividly alive characters know one another, but all exist inside this nervous moment in time.

Throughout the novel, characters’ voices recur in random ways, each around their own “small life.” Each person is in the middle of an action or a demand or a situation or a misunderstanding, and each is attempting to find a life, to know a life, to navigate the precarity of life. These lives are unfolding anywhere in the world: leaving the outskirts of Cartagena, working the streets of Madrid, caught in a toxic flood, hanging on to the edge of a boat in the Mediterranean, cleaning a stall in a North American airport, setting off to work on an oil platform, refusing eviction from an apartment. Their stories build and braid through inference, familiarity, and emotion—shock, realization, small joy—offering glimpses of the innermost workings of human beings in our contemporary, catastrophic zeitgeist.