A quiet disappearance, Rabindranath Maharaj

Mawenzi House, 2025

A Quiet Disappearance is a collection of thematically similar short stories centred around Canadian seniors who immigrated from the Caribbean decades ago. There are several common threads weaving the stories together (a man whose partner has left him, obituaries from overseas newspapers, a common sense of mortality) but the element that most connects them is the fading of the protagonists from their own lives—several quiet disappearances. Inhabiting multiple first-person perspectives, Maharaj’s writing deftly teases out the differences between his narrators, showcasing how diverse individual experiences come together to form a multifaceted exploration of confronting, but also resisting, one’s own sense of disappearing.

––Anjalee Nadarajan, Mississauga