ChildhoodChildhood

"A meditation on the elusiveness of the past and humanity's yearning for emotional closure. Childhood is Andre Alexis's picaresque debut novel. It features Thomas Macmillan, a Canadian with ties to Trinidad, who pieces together--from memory and from related stories--the early years of his life. Raised in Petrolia, a small town in southern Ontario near the U.S. border, Thomas is abandoned by his mother to the care of an eccentric grandmother. When he reaches the age of nine, his mother Katarina and a Mr. Mataf take him on a pilgrimage to Ottawa, where they live in the Victorian home of Mr. Henry Wing, a magus-like figure, whose love of science and the imagination becomes an important legacy for Thomas."--