Reuniting with Strangers by Jennilee Austria-Bonifacio

When five-year-old Monolith is taken from the Philippines to live with his mother in Canada, he immediately lashes out. Unable or unwilling to speak, he attacks her and destroys his new home.

Everyone wants to know why and everyone has a theory. But unlike the solid certainty his name suggests, the answer isn't so simple.

From a cliffside town in the Tagaytay highlands of the Philippines, to the Filipino communities in the desert of Osoyoos, the Arctic world of Iqaluit, the suburbs of southern Ontario, Sarnia's Chemical Valley, Montral's Cte-des-Neiges, and Toronto's Little Manila, Austria-Bonifacio takes readers into the kaleidoscope of the Filipino diaspora, uncovering the displacement, estrangement, resilience and healing that happen behind closed doors.

As each chapter unfolds, truths are revealed in humorous, joyful, devastating and surprising ways: through an incisive caregiver's instruction manual, a custody battle over texts and e-mails, a disarmingly direct self-help guide, a series of desperate rsums, a kundiman songbookand more.

Monolith appears again and again, as a misbehaving boy in a store, the subject of town gossip, a face in a fundraising campaign, a client in questionable care, a dying man's beacon of hope and an unlikely new friend. (From Douglas & McIntyre)

Reuniting With Strangerswas on thelonglist for Canada Reads 2024.

• How Jennilee Austria-Bonifacio translated decades of work with Filipino newcomers into powerful fiction
• The best Canadian fiction of 2023

JennileeAustria-Bonifacio is a Filipina-Canadian author whose stories appear in the anthologiesChanging the Face of Canadian LiteratureandMagdaragat: An Anthology of Filipino-Canadian Writing. She was a finalist for the Jim Wong-Chu Emerging Authors Award and waslonglisted for the 2022 CBC Short Story PrizeforHer Life's Work.She lives in Toronto.

How Jennilee Austria-Bonifacio wroteReuniting with Strangers

"I went to a school as a settlement worker a long time ago, and the teachers were saying, 'We wish you were here earlier. There was this family that really needed your help, but they've moved on to another school.'"

"They said he [the boy] was upset to the point where at nighttime, he would get quite violent with her [his mother] and she would call the police to restrain him. I thought to myself, 'How do you get to this point where you're calling the police on a five-year-old boy?' Second, 'Why is he so angry? Is it behavioural or is it something else?'"

He impacts a lot of change and he appears at moments of change in people's narratives.- Jennilee Austria-Bonifacio

"This was in my head for years, so that's why Monolith's story ends up in all the other stories. He impacts a lot of change and he appears at moments of change in people's narratives."

Interviews withJennilee Austria-Bonifacio