Weaving between wistful memories of youthful ambition and the compromises and comforts of age, travelling between the streets of Dar es Salaam and Toronto, and places in between, the characters in these stories must negotiate distance—between here and there; between lives imagined and lives lived; between expectation and disappointment; between inclusion and exclusion.

Throughout, Vassanji engages passionately with the intellectual and political questions that inspire him as a writer and a citizen, while always matching the energy of his ideas with the empathy and emotional depth he invests in his characters. As with all Vassanji’s finest work, What You Are stands as a model of artistic integrity and clarity of vision.

RELEASE DATE: MAY 2021

M G Vassanji weaves haunting tales of lives transplanted, of the traumas small and large of migration, of the bitterness of memory, and the unexpected consequences of hope. Ranging from the suburbs of Toronto to the Indian community of Kenya, from drought-stricken Gujarat to small-town Midwest, When She Was Queen is quiet and composed, penetrating and often startling. It is a portrait of an increasingly modern condition, of lives caught in our swiftly changing and contradictory world.

Dar es Salaam's bustling Uhuru Street comes alive in these stories set in the colonial 1950s and the post-independence '60s and '70s. Meet Pipa the miserly shopkeeper with his secret; the ideal servant Ali who turns out to be a peeping-tom; the Goan dress-maker Alzira and her secret agony; the demented fiance called Two-elephants-lost; the London-returned, back for the holidays, who falls wildly in love...