Review of Brilliant

Brilliant

Brilliant is an apt title for Denise Roig’s third collection of short stories in which the word itself becomes a refrain like a dropped jewel appearing randomly in a variety of contexts. The word describes Abu Dhabi, that shining city sprung from the desert, so much a presence in these stories it takes on the depth of a character itself. Its inhabitants rile against it, are seduced and altered by its heat and money, affronted by its boldness and materialism, humbled by its sacredness.

The GPS in “Please Drive the Highlighted Route” has a name and a gender, and yet as a directional device, Fiona, as she’s called, has little aptitude. While Fiona sets her adrift along Ontario highways past big-box stores under a grey sky, Deborah recollects her life in Abu Dhabi. “She’d spent four years waiting to come back but here she was: still suspended.” These stories are rife with comings and goings and confusions over the way home—is there really such a place?

Doctora Latifa appears in the three stories titled “Oasis” and functions in this collection as a more accurate directional device than Fiona; her insights navigate us through the historical changes that made the United Arab Emirates a country in 1972 and catapulted Abu Dhabi into a cosmopolitan metropolis. Based on the Canadian nurse Gertrude Dyck, who went to the desert in 1962 and stayed for thirty-eight years, Doctora serves as the quintessential witness and moral compass of the collection. In “Oasis 1962” she observes, “No amount of money will erase who these people are. The sky, the heat, the emptiness, will keep us rooted.”

Brilliant affords us the delight of linked stories. Sometimes the endings are not quite complete, but then we encounter the same character again, giving the collection, taken together, a novelistic feel. Mathieu is having an affair with Angie in “Fridays by the Pool” and several stories later, in “19th & Khaleej Al Arabi,” he comes to terms with his habit of infidelity when he comforts the attractive and grieving wife of a friend recently killed in a cycling accident. It’s in another story that we meet the driver, unknown to Mathieu, who hit the stranger on the bicycle.

Roig adopts the voices of a broad representation of Abu Dhabi society complete with colloquialisms, a sprinkling of Arab terms and Tagalog-tinged English. Characters range from a fifteen-year-old Indian Brit to a boy-lusting Egyptian pastry chef, a host of disenfranchised domestic servants, a weary Anglican pastor, and a large cast of mall-cruising, coffee- and cocktail-soaked bored wives from the west. This latter group lives in lush villas with underpaid servants and occasional bouts of first-world guilt. Angie’s maid, in “Fridays by the Pool,” “shoots Angie a look that lands where she knows it will, right in Angie’s uneasy sense of western justice and entitlement.” Sometimes the decadence is outrageous fun; there is the jet setting “local” Emirati who regularly picks up a girl for the weekend, has his way with her, and on Sunday morning sends her back to the airport perched like a mama bird on a nest of bills in a cash-stuffed Hummer: an image that paints the character of Abu Dhabi in bold and audacious tones. These tales are told amongst the ex-pat community with mockery and a hint of moral superiority. Yet, as Doctora observes, “In the desert there isn’t much you can do but submit.”

The author is keen to pass on her considerable knowledge of this part of the world: its economy and social structure, its injustices, and inanities. At times an excess of information turns the prose away from the story and into reportage. In “Coffee,” Loissa, who resides in a shelter for Filipina women marooned in the UAE, explains, “In shelter we are 300 Filipinas….Head to head, toe to toe….too many crying Filipina. Embassy say nothing. Our country need this country.” The author’s compassion for the very real plight of women migrant workers in the UAE is evident, but the complexity of her character’s psyche is not.

Some images are expected: “a man in a starched white khandoura strolling down the vaulted halls.” Alternatively, Roig is at her best when she takes the reader into a deeper place and reveals something not easily known. In “Please Drive to Highlighted Route” we see through Deborah’s eyes the moon landing on the domes of the Grand Mosque: “And finally at month’s end, they glowed brilliant white. One could mark time by the domes.” In the nuanced scene at the end of “Vicarage” Tina realizes that the charity work in which she’s been absorbed has made her unavailable to her teenage son who is now headed for an Emirati jail.

Back in Canada, Deborah grieves for Abu Dhabi, a city she finally comes to understand in the limited way we understand any place, lover, child, or parent, only to the extent that they reveal themselves to us. And in the last installment of “Oasis,” Roig offers up one final image so concise it’s seen as if in a camera’s brilliant flash. Beneath a “forty-five gallon oil drum that looks as small as a can of cola” amidst the sand dunes, Doctora’s driver pulls out a small carpet and prostrates himself on “the sand without end....I feel him praying for us all.” Meanwhile, mere miles away, a great city sits atop that same shifting, inscrutable desert.


— Judy LeBlanc The Malahat Review

More Reviews of this title

Brilliant

Denise Roig’s new collection of short fiction Brilliant is set in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Drawing on her experiences as a reporter for Abu Dhabi’s English-language newspaper The National, Roig portrays a city which has expanded from a small desert outpost into an ultramodern metropolis in less than fifty years, and is still suffering growing pains.  

Brilliant is Roig’s third collection of short stories, and her first book since her memoir Butter Cream: A Year in a Montreal Pastry School was published in 2008. These stories introduce us to characters from different cultures and classes of Abu Dhabi society. The city’s rapid growth has necessitated a large work force from all over the world and Roig draws her characters from this global labour pool, giving the reader several viewpoints on this multicultural desert city.  

The collection’s opening story is one of the strongest. “Rice Dreams” is set in the Al Zaabi Finest Bakery, which employs citizens of the Philippines, Jordan, India, and elsewhere. Focusing on Bashir, an Egyptian baker, Roig portrays some of the privations migrant workers face in a country with no labour laws. When staff is cut, Bashir’s workload doubles, and he sleeps on a hundred pound bag of flour in the kitchen in case a late-night order comes in. Roig provides rich descriptions of the making of maamoul and baklawa, as well as Bashir’s exhaustion as he and his co-workers toil at all hours to feed the city’s insatiable appetite for sweets.


— Jeff Miller Cult MTL

Brilliant

In Brilliant, the dazzling promise of wealth and opportunity quickly fades in the Abu Dhabi heat. Denise Roig’s newest collection of short stories is set in the capital of the United Arab Emirates, where she worked as a journalist from 2008 to 2011. Brilliant is her third collection of short fiction, and she has also written a memoir, Butter Cream: A Year in a Montreal Pastry School (2008).

The collection opens from the point of view of a pastry chef, but Roig soon demonstrates her versatility as a writer beyond the kitchen. “Rice Dreams,” the story of patriotic pastry chef Bashir, his apprentice, and their cheery Filipino cook, quickly sets the tone for the collection. By the end of the first story, their group is affected by rumours, cost cutting measures, and basic human cruelty. From various points of view, each of Brilliant’s fifteen pieces begins optimistically until greed, injustice, and the cost of progress begin to surface.

The title, Brilliant, denotes not only the sparkling opulence pictured on the cover, it also reflects a certain regional frustration with the immoderate use of the word by British ex-pats who have moved to Abu Dhabi in search of higher pay.

Foreigners on work visas make up the bulk of the population of Abu Dhabi, capital of the nouveau riche United Arab Emirates. Drawn by the promise of wealth, a middle class of educated ex-pats have flocked to oil-rich Abu Dhabi to cash in. Meanwhile, a servant class endures physical and verbal abuse, endeavouring to send their earnings home to the Philippines, Egypt, and Pakistan. As the Emirati lose interest in or patience with the projects they finance, their ex-pat employees suffer ever growing workloads due to diminishing funding, encroaching deadlines, and ever-increasing expectations. Roig offers unique examples of such projects in “Folly,” where the undertaking of a five lane private bridge is plagued by delays and firings, and in “The Knowledge,” where she describes an ill-advised rapid transit project that sits abandoned in the desert.

The replaceability of the working class crowd is a recurring theme. Subject to volatile employment conditions, they find themselves on the first plane home when their utility runs out. Though the doctors and engineers of the working class are free to leave at any time, those of the servant class are not so lucky. With their own countries financially dependant on the good will of the UAE, little is done by foreign governments to help their citizens abroad. If they are unwilling to quietly suffer the verbal and physical abuses of their employers, servants may have their earnings held back and their visas seized, rendering them unable to return home. This state of affairs is given a face in “Fridays by the Pool in Khalidiyah” and “Vicarage,” though both stories unfold and resolve quite differently.

Although some of Brilliant’s characters are not cast in the most flattering light, they do more than serve simply as character sketches of particular ethnic groups. Roig’s collection by no means finds fault solely among the Emirati. Abu Dhabi’s middle class is not depicted as any less greedy, oppressive or unsympathetic than the upper classes. Having servants themselves, first-world ex-pats engage in the same practices of underpayment and oppression toward their servants. In “Coffee,” one expat cautions another about how much to pay their maid: “The girls don’t expect it. Don’t go starting a revolution!”

Three of the collection’s stories involve adultery centrally — and a few more, peripherally — but corruption is only one facet of Roig’s narratives. If there is an underlying theme, it’s that money corrupts, but people with beautiful spirits thrive everywhere, particularly in “Fridays by the Pool in Khalidiyah” and “Vicarage.” Throughout, we find that some characters and their actions are intertwined, reappearing as secondary characters in other stories. In this way, Roig is able to show how the various classes remain interconnected, and that the problems they face are systemic.

Brilliant finds its stride at about the halfway point. “Velvet” is a moving story about homesickness and loss framed as a quest for the perfect gravy. The main character’s feelings about her constant displacement are beautifully summarized when she discloses that “Every couple of years — okay, more than that — she would come to a juncture where things stood out in too-bold, too-sad relief.” In “Please Drive to Highlighted Route,” a conversation with an intuitive GPS device becomes a plea for divine intervention.

Though all but the last of the stories are set in Abu Dhabi, they remain highly accessible to the reader. The cultural and historical background of the region is handled with a light touch. The stories are not bogged down by too much information, but one never feels at a loss for context either. While the first half of the collection is more political, working towards providing context, the stories in the latter half are unique, touching and sincere. Brilliant is as much about people as it is about place; the differences it presents are striking, but the similarities are what stay with you.


— Dan Twerdochlib The Winnipeg Review

Brilliant

Denise Roig's latest collection of stories, Brilliant, reveals the dark side of life in the United Arab Emirates. But it also reflects the omnipresent sunlight, the expanse of the turquoise gulf, the glistening skyscrapers, the newness of the entire place ...

Born in New York and raised in Los Angeles, Denise Roig spent a couple of decades in Montreal before pulling up roots in 2008 and moving her family to another world: Abu Dhabi, capital of the oil-rich United Arab Emirates. Her husband, a former editor with The Montreal Gazette, took a job with an Emirati newspaper. Roig freelanced for that same paper during the four years they spent there. Since becoming a country in 1971, the UAE has made the transition from camels to luxury cars and from stretches of desert to stretches of highway. Of its population of roughly 9 million, only about one-and-a-half million are Emirati citizens. The rest-the vast majority-are expatriates, mostly from Southeast Asia or other Arab countries, while a tiny minority comes from Europe, the US, Canada, Australia and South Africa. In this loosely linked collection of stories, Roig gives us an insider's view of that expat minority: the overworked husbands-bankers, lawyers, and engineers-their under occupied wives driving air-conditioned SUVs from coffee shop to shopping mall to lunch date, and their kids wallowing in the freedom of the place. A teenager from England exults, "I love my Abu. I love it to pieces ... The beach, the sun, the shopping, the travelling. Golf lessons, billionaire buddies, gold dust on the chocolate mousse at Emirates Palace." These stories also take us into Emirati homes, where the women are swathed in abayas, black robes worn over tight jeans, and the men in flowing white khandouras, with their coffee rituals, and baklawa and maamouls "piled high, in perfectly arranged pyramids." She unveils other pyramids too: the hierarchies formed by the all-powerful sheiks, presiding over Emirati locals, the expat professionals and those on the bottom rung, the servants and workers, who make it possible for the wealthy to live lives of ease. The Filipina nannies and Ethiopian housemaids, exploited and severely underpaid, the Pakistani drivers who spend their days picking up orders of pastries and chauffeuring spoiled children.  Yet with everything that exasperates Roig, and some of her characters, about this country-the obscene wealth, the human rights abuses, the censorship and tight control over so many aspects of people's lives-we sense that she has grown to love this place, and we wonder why. The reasons only become clear in one of her final stories. After spending four years in the UAE (like the author), a Canadian woman returns home to southern Ontario to find herself seeking out mosques and shawarma joints, missing "the call to prayer filtering through windows ... the whoosh of relief when you stepped from impossible heat into air conditioning, the Sudanese guard in their building who put his hand over his heart when she greeted him." Our heightened senses in a foreign land. Now, when we hear and read news daily about the Muslim world, much of it negative, much of it coming to us from biased sources, it's exhilarating to have Denise Roig pull back the veil and allow us a glimpse of this place and herself in it, what she disliked when she was there, and what she cherishes now that she's not.


— Shelley Pomerance Montréal Centre-Ville

Brilliant

Denise Roig is the author of a number of books, including “A Quiet Night & A Perfect End” (a collection of short stories). She moved to Abu Dhabi in 2008 but now lives in Hamilton, Ontario.

To paraphrase from the publisher’s website, “Brilliant” is a collection of short stories set in Abu Dhabi,  a city where cultures collide and converge. In the stories a cast of characters (including an Egyptian pastry chef, a Canadian nurse and newly destitute English couple amongst others) navigate Abu Dhabi discovering the limits of freedom, money, tolerance and their own good sense.

The book doesn’t fall into any of my three main categories that I have spoken about previously (“can do no wrong authors”, “tick three boxes”, and “you have my support”) but over the last year I have added a fourth category – “Books about my new home” – which this one falls squarely into. I was therefore happy to give it a go.

So what did I think of “Brilliant”? In short I enjoyed it very much (I suppose I could say “it is brilliant”, but that would be a bit cheesy). Before I started I hadn’t really appreciated it was a collection of short stories that crossed over in places. In fact I don’t think I had fully appreciated whether it was fiction or non fiction. Once I had got a little way into the book I had to go back and check which it was because what it describes is so vivid.

Why did I enjoy it so much? Because there was a lot in there I could relate to – it mentioned places I know or have heard of, it described situations I could relate to from what I have learned about life in the UAE in the short time I have been here. From the other categories of books that I enjoy (set in places I know in the UK, etc) this is important to me.

It also introduced me to characters who I wanted to keep reading to find out more about. Most importantly once I had finished it left me wanting to hear still more about how the lives of some of the (more likeable) characters would develop. That’s got to be a good thing.

Would I recommend the book to others? Definitely to people who live / have lived / are going to live in Abu Dhabi and are interested in reading material that is related to the city. It gave me a good sense of what life in the city is, and was, like. To be honest I’m less sure as to whether I would recommend it to anyone who does not have a “connection” to the city, although if you interested in reading about different cultures you will probably enjoy it.


— Peter Chambers The Quantified Expat

Brilliant

With its stunning cover, contrasting the architectural details of the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque with the elemental sand which is its underpinning, Denise Roig’s collection of interconnected stories opens a vibrantly exotic and alien world to English-speaking readers. Illustrating the disparities of social life within the United Arab Emirates as lived by those who make up its oil-rich economy, these stories highlight universal themes within domestic circumstances which every reader will be able to appreciate: a pastry chef from Egypt, so poor he has to sleep inside a flour bag, wants to present a special gift to the sheikh he admires and who employs him; a Filipina servant woman begs to borrow a cellphone from a neighbor woman in order to escape her abusive circumstances; a doctor delivers the baby of a fourteen-year-old girl, who has no idea what is happening to her; a limo driver voluntarily takes the obnoxious son of his employer to see an experimental “green city” where both learn an important lesson.

These are just a few of the characters who come and go and sometimes overlap within these stories illustrating the almost impossible riches held by the sheikhs and their families and the almost unimaginable poverty in which their help lives. The only members of the middle class who appear here are the educated foreign professionals who have been hired to work for Emirati businesses or as teachers, doctors, and nurses, and their stories become the literary buffers between the very rich and the very poor, enabling the author to make her points about all aspects of society without constantly resorting to black and white stereotypes. The biggest difference among these groups is that only the middle class is really free to leave.

The professional class here has come primarily from the United States, England, Canada, Scotland, and other first world, mostly English-speaking, countries, bringing their values and goals with them and forming their own societies within the complexes in which they live. The poor here – employed primarily as nannies, cooks, housekeepers, and maids – come from the Philippines, Egypt, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Palestine. These poor immigrant women live primarily with the families for whom they work, their freedoms severely curtailed. The poor men tend to live in labor camps and dorms, sometimes with twelve men to a bunk. Shifting points of view allow people from each of these groups to speak to the reader.

Three short sections – “Oasis, 1962”; “Oasis, 1972”; and “Oasis, 1973” – inserted among the stories, help to set the time periods and provide factual information about the formation and development of the Emirates, and the speed of this growth is almost impossible to digest. The futility of life for some of these characters is exacerbated by the lack of respect in which they are held, yet Roig describes the kindness of one starving servant whose desire to help someone else in need shines through when she has her only chance to escape. Some of the wealthy seem to regard their dependent help as throw-aways, just as they also sometimes build “bright new things,” which they abandon or allow to decay because of “the drudgery of having to make [them] work.” Justice is not democratic. Ultimately, the greed of some of the foreigners who become caught up in the frenzy to buy, buy, buy, leads to a kind of blindness, and when the crash comes, as it inevitably does, disaster is only a step away. As one character remarks, “Sand moves fast."


— Mary Whipple Seeing the World Through Books

Brilliant

Speaking on the phone from her home in Hamilton, Denise Roig sounds every inch the homesick former Montrealer.

“If you’ve lived for 20 years in Montreal, southern Ontario is as foreign a country as Abu Dhabi is,” said the New York-born writer, a Montreal resident from the late 1980s until 2008.

It’s not a random parallel Roig is drawing. You see, from 2008 to 2011, Roig, along with her husband, former Gazette copy editor Ray Beauchemin, and their teenage daughter, Georgia, lived in — yes — Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates. They were there as the result of a whirlwind process in which Beauchemin was offered and accepted a charter position as deputy foreign editor for a new newspaper, the brainchild of the local ruling sheiks, called The National. They’re back in Canada now because … well, let’s let Roig tell it.

“The story of the paper is the story of the country, in many ways,” she said. “A lot of what happens is that there is this lovely idea and then no one to attend to it. The attention span (is) so short, the tolerance for any frustration so low. The (paper) began with so much hope — the managing editor at the time greeted the staff on the very first day with ‘Welcome to the last great newspaper adventure.’ Money was being funnelled in; the dream was that it was going to be the New York Times of the Middle East. But it became apparent right away that they were able to do very little. Within six months, the clampdown began.”

Constrictions of censorship and gradually shrinking budget notwithstanding, Roig did manage to freelance for The National on a near full-time basis, writing various local-interest stories as well as a short-lived food column, the last gig a perfect one given that she had trained as a pastry chef and written about food for The Gazette.

“Having all those story assignments certainly opened up that world to me in a way that wouldn’t have happened if I had been a housewife,” Roig recalled of her steep learning curve.

With her dawning local knowledge, though, came an unavoidable reckoning with the country’s dark side, most starkly in the form of the appalling conditions suffered by legions of foreign labourers, domestics and service-industry workers — exploitation meted out not only by the Emeratis, but routinely by the expat white-collar community.

“Volunteering in a shelter run by the Indonesian embassy for nannies and housemaids who had fled their employers — that’s where I really saw what was happening beyond the lovely speeches about grand economic projects,” she said. “And remember, I wasn’t a nanny, I wasn’t an Indian labourer. I was a white western woman, someone to impress with how progressive, how humane, how hospitable (the country) was.”

All of those seemingly irreconcilable impressions have now borne fruit in the form of the collection Brilliant, 15 stand-alone stories that, as a group, add up to a dazzling and frequently sobering top-to-bottom portrait of a society. For all its roots in the author’s firsthand observations, though, Brilliant shouldn’t be mistaken for a lightly fictionalized travel journal. As good writers do, Roig has transmuted what she saw and felt into art.

“The hard thing in fiction, always, is subtlety,” Roig said. “It’s what one aims at.”

In this case, happily, it is also what has been achieved.

While stories like "Fridays by the Pool in Khalidiyah" nail the social rituals of expat professionals with near-reportorial immediacy, Roig’s gift is especially apparent in stories whose protagonists are farthest from the author’s life experience — empathetic leaps like "The Knowledge," about a Pakistani cab driver ferrying a local rich kid, and the, ahem, brilliant "National Day," about the teenage daughter of Indian doctors. A representative of “third culture” kids, young people alienated both from the place they were born and from their parents’ culture, "National Day"’s narrator heroine is a salutary reminder of how the young, often the quickest to adapt, can also be the first to fall.

“I had a lot of contact with kids because of my daughter and her friends, who were 13, 14, 15 years old while we were living there,” Roig said. “Many of them had been born there, and there’s an attempt, that one can perhaps never really pull off, to be of that place, to be fully accepted.”

Where Roig comes perhaps closest to a self-portrait is in "Please Drive to Highlighted Route." The longest story in the book and the only one set in Canada, it’s a totally convincing depiction of a very particular kind of anomie, one that Roig herself ran into headlong when she came back from the UAE.

“You’ve gone someplace and been changed by it and there’s no opportunity to talk about it,” Roig recalled. “It’s been a long, long adjustment. And I’ve been disappointed, in general, by peoples’ lack of curiosity. You know, ‘Abu Dhabi? Where’s that?’ ”

Another source of disappointment for Roig has been the blanket silence that has greeted Brilliant in Abu Dhabi, where hoped-for reviews and interviews simply haven’t materialized. For Roig and her family, it’s one more entry in a ledger of opposite extremes.

“We have a love-hate relationship with the place, for sure,” she said. “We remember how disappointed and disillusioned we were, but still we get misted up about it probably once a week.”

So, do they have any regrets about having gone in the first place?

“We do have occasional moments of wondering whether we made the right decision, but if we hadn’t gone we would have missed … this mountain of an experience, this peak thing in our lives. What did it lead to? Well, what does anything like this lead to? It leads to an interesting life.”


— Ian McGillis Montreal Gazette

Brilliant

An Egyptian pastry chef. A Canadian nanny. A philandering Frenchman. A Filipina maid. This multifarious cast of characters nearly climbs off the page in Denise Roig’s new volume of short stories, Brilliant. Set entirely in Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates, Brilliant paints a rich and at times unsettling portrait of a city that has suddenly found itself a fountain of excessive wealth, with all its attendant pleasures and pitfalls.

Rebecca Galloway spoke with its author.

You were born in New York, raised in Los Angeles, and lived for a long spell in Montreal. What brought you to Abu Dhabi?

We moved to Abu Dhabi after the Gazette — where my husband had worked for 15 years — began a new round of buy-outs and lay-offs. I remember that it was Halloween night 2007. Like: Happy Halloween! Hope I have a job by Christmas! The very next day, Ray heard about a new English-language newspaper, The National in Abu Dhab, that was recruiting editors and reporters from all over the Commonwealth. On an adventurous impulse, he applied for a position on the foreign desk, got hired and was on a plane for Abu Dhabi by the end of January 2008. Our daughter, then 13, and I followed in September.

Did you know immediately upon arrival that you would end up writing about the city? Your observations are wonderfully detailed.

I was very lucky to be hired as a freelance writer for The National almost immediately. During my three years in Abu Dhabi I wrote stories about food (I had a weekly food column for a while), family, books, dance, anything they’d let me do. Writing those stories took me out into the streets of the city, meeting people, seeing places I wouldn’t have otherwise. (Many ex-pat wives, even if they’re professionals back home, have a hard time finding a place for themselves in this city. Unless you have a job yourself and are sponsored by that employer, you are there technically on your husband’s visa, with “housewife” written as your profession.)

From the beginning, I was completely fascinated by the city, its history and the people: expats, locals and royals. I was a bit naive probably. By the third year I’d become more critical, even cynical about the hype, the need to be the best, the shiniest, the most “brilliant” city on earth. The more I wrote, the more people and situations I encountered, the deeper I felt compelled to go into my fictional Abu Dhabi life. I like extremity; I like what happens when my characters are flat up against a wall, forced to act, respond, change. Abu Dhabi is a place of such extremes, such crazy juxtapositions, such incredible excess that it was a natural platform for me.  

The links between the stories are deftly woven, especially those centred around the hit-and-run bicycle accident. At other times, the narrative links are as simple as Daisy the Filipina maid making a cameo appearance in a different story, à la Bret Easton Ellis and his revolving cast of pop-ups. Why did you choose to write interlinked short stories instead of, say, a novel?

I love reading collections of linked stories — Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge and Clark Blaise’s The Meagre Tarmac come to mind — and I’d attempted trios of linked stories in my second collection, Any Day Now. But I wanted the links to be looser this time, to work with the connections as a free, even accidental or subconscious choice, not a forced or formulaic device. And, as many writers find in the process of writing, there were some characters, some situations — such as the bicycle accident — that I couldn’t let go of after the initial story. There must be more to this, I sensed. And so another story would grow out of the same material, but skewed differently, told differently.

And funny you should ask, So why not just write a novel about the characters that won’t leave you alone?! My editor/publisher, Karen Haughian, also wondered if this wouldn’t work more effectively as a novel. I tried to imagine that for a few days, but couldn’t see how I’d pull it off. And then I realized I didn’t want to write an Abu Dhabi novel. Brilliant wanted to be told in stories, some connected, some not. If it had wanted to be a novel, it would have been a novel. I do believe the writing itself tells us what it wants to be.

On that note, is it true you’re currently working on a novella for your next project?

Well, it seemed I was working on two linked — love those links! — novellas. A mother/daughter story involving both Ontario and Turkish/Kurdish politics. But it sounds overly ambitious to me right now and so I’ve just begun something lighter, a real departure after my last books. It’s time, I think, for a little fun. Though, knowing what I tend to gravitate toward, it could be some dark fun!


— Rebecca Galloway Rover

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