Theory - by Dionne Brand (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

From the award-winning novelist and poet Dionne Brand, a smart, sensual, and witty novel about what happens when love and intellect are set on a collision course.

Theory begins as its narrator sets out, like many a graduate student, to write a wildly ambitious thesis on the past, present, and future of art, culture, race, gender, class, and politics--a revolutionary work that its author believes will synthesize and thereby transform the world.

While our narrator tries to complete this magnum opus, three lovers enter the story, one after the other, each transforming the endeavor: first there is beautiful and sensual Selah, who scoffs at the narrator's constant tinkering with academic abstractions; then altruistic and passionate Yara, who rescues every lost soul who crosses her path; and finally spiritual occultist Odalys, who values magic and superstition over the heady intellectual and cultural circles the narrator aspires to inhabit. Each galvanizing love affair (representing, in turn, the heart, the head, and the spirit) upends and reorients the narrator's life and, inevitably, requires an overhaul of the ever larger and more unwieldy dissertation, with results both humorous and poignant.

By effortlessly telling this short, intense tale in the voice of an unnamed, ungendered (and brilliantly unreliable) narrator, Dionne Brand makes a bold statement not only about love and personhood, but about race and gender--and what can and cannot be articulated in prose when the forces that inhabit the space between words are greater than words themselves.

Theory is a gorgeous, profoundly moving, word- and note-perfect novel of ideas that only a great artist at the height of her powers could write.

About the Author

Dionne Brand is a renowned poet, novelist, and essayist known for formal experimentation and the beauty and urgency of her work. Brand's award-winning volumes of poetry include Land to Light On, thirsty, Inventory, Ossuaries (winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize), and The Blue Clerk (winner of the Trillium Book Award). Theory, her 2018 novel, received the Toronto Book Award. Brand was a recipient of the 2021 Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction. She served as Toronto's third poet laureate from 2009 to 2012, and was named to the Order of Canada in 2017. Until recently a professor in the School of English and Theater Studies at the University of Guelph, Brand will serve as editorial director, overseeing a new imprint, Alchemy, at Knopf Canada.