Love Enough

By: Dionne Brand

Narrated by: Khadijah Roberts-Abdullah

From our acclaimed poet and novelist: a gem of a novel that sizzles about love—between lovers, between friends, and for the places we live in—and pays homage to each moment of experience.

Love lasted only one year but the time felt like several springs strung together.

In Love Enough, the sharp beauty of Brand's writing draws us effortlessly into the intersecting stories of her characters caught in the middle of choices, apprehensions, fears. Each of the tales here—June's, Bedri's, Da'uud's, Lia's opens a different window on the city they all live in, mostly in parallel, but occasionally, delicately, touching and crossing one another. Each story radiates other stories. In this book, the urban landscape cannot be untangled from the emotional one; they mingle, shift and cleave to one another.

The young man Bedri experiences the terrible isolation brought about by an act of violence, while his father, Da'uud, casualty of a geopolitical conflict, driving a taxi, is witness to curious gestures of love and anger; Lia faces the sometimes unbridgeable chasms of family; and fierce June, ambivalent and passionate with her string of lovers, now in middle age discovers: "There is nothing universal or timeless about this love business. It is hard if you really want to do it right." Brand is our greatest observer—of actions, of emotions, of the little things that often go unnoticed but can mean the turn of a day. At once lucid and dream-like, Love Enough is a profoundly modern work that speaks to the most fundamental questions of how we live now.

©2023 Dionne Brand (P)2023 Vintage Canada

Critic reviews

"Brand has two gifts that are incendiary in combination: a concise and intelligent grasp of the subtleties of emotion and an apparently effortless facility with language. The result is an extraordinary ability to capture the flicker of experience."—The Globe and Mail

"Using potent poetic language, Brand weaves these characters' stories—they often brush up against each other—into a powerful narrative. All yearn to liberate themselves from problematic relationships. . . . In Love Enough, our city seethes with love, pain, triumph and tragedy. Nobody writes about Toronto like Brand."—Susan G. Cole, NOW (Toronto)

"Love Enough is a series of surrealist sketches, a gentle, eloquent, insightful collection of souls and circumstances, brimming with passion and politics and shimmering glimpses of forgiveness. . . . Love Enough is clearly the work of a writer who knows and is faithful to her enormous talent for observation and storytelling."—Lesley Hughes, Winnipeg Free Press