"Brand shows that learning to read English literature involved learning not to notice who, or what, was missing . . . Brand's key point is that the minutiae of white characters' daily lives serve to conceal the unseen -- unsalvaged -- minutiae of the enslaved and Indigenous lives under imperial control . . . Equally suggestive are moments in Brand's book when she shows us how a passage ostensibly not about the violence of colonialism is in fact a barely conscious acknowledgment of it." --Sophie Gee, The New York Times Book Review

"In this insightful meditation on her formation as a colonial subject, Brand attends to the instrumentality of the novel and the regime of the aesthetic in the project of empire . . . A life can be "destroyed" by books, Brand observes . . . A life also can be remade by books." --Saidiya Hartman, BOMB

"Award-winning novelist Brand, Toronto's former poet laureate, melds autobiography and literary criticism to offer a shrewd, intimate reading of the 17th-, 18th-, and 19th-century novels that shaped her sense of self . . . [a] penetrating cultural criticism." --Kirkus (starred review)

"In this scintillating literary analysis, Canadian poet Brand, who grew up in Trinidad, examines depictions of imperialism in works by Charlotte Brontë, William Thackeray, and other British writers . . . Brand's piercing analysis is at once sweeping and deeply personal . . . It's a potent reevaluation of the British literary canon." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)