I really became attached to Michael as a character. As morally grey as he was, he seemed like the one shining light in this gloomy, hostile world. I loved to watch the evolution of the relationships and the way Michael's outlook begins to change when he befriends someone from outside the home. Brother won the 2017 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, the 2018 Toronto Book Award and the 2018 Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. It was also longlisted for the 2017 Scotiabank Giller Prize.

It is so well written, although horrifying, it feels 100% plausible. I mean, why couldn't this happen? As they grow older, Michael begins to see what Francis sees. “One morning I peered with Francis into a newspaper box to read a headline about the latest terror and caught in the glass the reflection of our own faces.” Still, Francis tries. He takes care of awkward Michael, who is prone to misfiring with the neighbourhood boys (“Yeah, homeboy is indubitably dope!”). Francis keeps him at arm’s length from the dangers and futile dreams that take shape in Desirea’s barbershop, a place where, among the do-rags and sharp fades, children of immigrants “found new language … kept the meanings close as skin”.Near the end of the novel, Mother takes her teenage boys for a walk. They watch tiny moths circle a plant near the creek. Michael describes them as torn pieces of an old book, “a scattered and wasted alphabet. Without any meaning at all.” But Mother retains her hope, useless as it may be. “Look closer,” she says. “Cup your hand and feel the proof of them against you. They’re not trash. They’re living things. And they’re flying.” Choose your book title from ‘A New Sibling for You’ or ‘You Are a Big Brother or Sister’, and we’ll add your fantastic title to the front cover. I gave no shits! I begged! I pleaded! Then thank Tom Cruise a friend got tired of me whiningtook pity on my poor soul and gifted me a copy. Brother takes us inside the lives of Michael and Francis. They are the sons of Trinidadian immigrants, their father has disappeared and their mother works double, sometimes triple, shifts so her boys might fulfil the elusive promise of their adopted home. This book follows the Morrow Family, but in particular Michael Morrow, the second son and the one who doesn't quite fit in. Michael was adopted into the family and has since been well-conditioned in the Morrow ways.

First, the facts. In the summer of 2010, at 4.13am, Gary rang 999, telling the operator he had been trying to kill himself. Taken to hospital by ambulance, he was left alone in a room, where he again tried to kill himself. Gary barely survived, but had to be put into a medically induced coma. His mother, young sister and brother John faced days of watching him die. Niven uses this period as a springboard into the past, trying to trace how Gary came to his hospital bed; to tell their story right from its start. First, add the older sibling: add a child’s name to the story, and see it magically appear on the cover, throughout the story and in the illustrations. We’ve designed six little characters to choose from, for both boy and girl. Select their gender, then choose from a selection of natural hair and skin tone options. It is horrible and dreadful, but it could happen. Nothing is scarier than mankind and their capacity to harm one another. At least not to me. Now, that’s not to say this wasn’t a stabby selection. On the contrary, it was indeed. It even featured a little something extra . . .

Ordinary Human Failings by Megan Nolan is a soulful meditation on family trauma

Throw in a music loving sister and older psycho brother who has decided his name should be "Reb" and you have a really close family. Young brother Michael goes along with the family. Because he really has to provide for the family because times is rough. The skill of Ahlborn's writing was on full display in the intricacies of the familial relationships. The relationship between Michael and his sister, Misty, was heartbreaking and that between Michael and his brother, Reb, the most disturbing and dysfunctional of all. And it is with this foundational belief in her safety that her universe diverges from that of her sons. Here is their most fundamental culture clash: she is a woman with a country where she is wanted, far away though it may be, and while her striving may lead nowhere, it probably won’t get her murdered by police.