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What We All Long For | 
 enlarge | Author: Dionne Brand
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Category: Book
List Price: $14.95
Buy New: $8.84
You Save: $6.11 (41%)
New (19) Used (6) from $5.99
Avg. Customer Rating:  3 reviews
Sales Rank: 565624
Media: Paperback
Edition: Anniversary
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 336
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.5 x 1
ISBN: 0312377711
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9780312377717
ASIN: 0312377711
Publication Date: November 25, 2008 (New: This Week)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Brand-new, MINT condition! Free of rips/tears/folds/etc.! Spine unbroken! Unread!
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Product Description
Dionne Brand powerfully delves into uncharted aspects of urban life, the bittersweetness of youth, and secrets families try to hide. Tuyen is an aspiring artist and the daughter of Vietnamese parents who’ve never recovered from losing one of their children while in the rush to flee Vietnam in the 1970s. She rejects her immigrant family’s hard-won lifestyle, and instead lives in a rundown apartment with friends—each of whom is grappling with their own familial complexities and heartache. In turns thrilling and heartbreaking, Tuyen’s lost brother—who has since become a criminal in the Thai underworld—journeys to Toronto to find his long-lost family. As Quy’s arrival nears, tensions build, friendships are tested, and an unexpected encounter will forever alter the lives of Tuyen and her friends. Gripping at times, heartrending at others, What We All Long For is an ode to a generation of longing and identity, and to the rhythms and pulses of a city and its burgeoning, questioning youth.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Something I Longed for March 3, 2007
Something I long for in WHAT WE ALL LONG FOR is the passionate engagement with a love of solitude and the genius with language that you find in so many of Brand's other books, for instance this inspired description of when she's living alone in her little house far out in the country in THE MAP TO THE DOOR OF NO RETURN, where she lives among neighbours who love "country music's lonesome and outlaw tenors" and where she scrutinizes "each window's drama of trees and sky", and on summer nights lies "in the very, very dark of the country, the smell of pine and cedar around me, the very quiet of the bush pressing in, and I listen till I fall asleep."
Or when she meditates on the relevance and nature of identity, on her Caribbean childhood, on flame trees that are "at their torrid best in the dry season."
But in WHAT WE ALL LONG FOR I found the novel's landscape (cityscape) too noisy, too populated, too busy for the arid world she ordinarily gives such a depth of emotion to.
Senior Teenagers November 9, 2005
I think that Dionne Brand has forgotten what it is like to be young. She makes the young characters in her book sound like wistful, whiny granmas and grandpas. She misses the immediacy.
For a better read, pick up larissa lai's When Fox is a Thousand, which manages to capture the vital, grittines thsi book tries for.
 Fabulously written June 5, 2005
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
The complexity of the characters and how every story intertwines so beautifully kept me absolutely riveted to this book! The ending took a somewhat unexpected, yet full-circle turn; making me leave the book feeling both closure, and wondering what would happen next. I dreamt about these characters for days afterwards.
The fact that it was based in Toronto was a bonus too. Nice to recognize the places described.
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