Dying in Toronto

All of Drndic's award-winning work fluctuates between fact and fiction, and Dying in Toronto gives an account of the author's first year in Canada as a refugee, in 1995. While the book is written in the form of essays, it is clearly shaped to tell of that year as a story, and the result is unique in both form and content, combining new techniques of creative personal confession and acute social perception, which offer a rare depth of insight and breadth of perspective on the real, difficult life of an immigrant.

Examining the instinct of the good citizen, our narrator considers the confusion of the multinational myth of the 'New World' through her highly refined, critical intellect. Along the way she creates nothing less than the portrait of a new literary figure - the contemporary intellectual refugee - a point of view at once of its time and acutely contemporary. Dying in Toronto is lucid and tenacious, witty and sad, part of the author's inability to reconcile with the status quo, and her fight for justice.