Nowhere, Exactly

*SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2024 WRITERS’ TRUST BALSILLIE PRIZE FOR PUBLIC POLICY
*LONGLISTED FOR THE 2025 J. W. DAFOE BOOK PRIZE

From one of Canada’s most celebrated writers, two-time Giller Prize winner M.G. Vassanji, comes a thoughtful meditation on what it means to belong in the world.

Home is never a single place, entirely and unequivocally. It is contingent. The abstract “nowhere,” then, is the true home.

M.G. Vassanji has been exploring identity and belonging for over three decades, drawing on his own eclectic upbringing and intimate understanding of the unique challenges and perspectives born from leaving one’s home and settling in a new land. The question of how to configure and see oneself within this new land, and within the larger world that’s opened up, is a constant, nagging challenge. In today’s world, possessing multiple identities has become a commonplace concept. But what does it mean to truly belong—to a place, a community, a faith . . . a history? Can we ever belong in our new home? Did we ever belong in the home we left? Where exactly do we belong? For many, the answer is nowhere, exactly. 

Combining brilliant prose, thoughtful, candid observation, and a lifetime of exploring how we as individuals are shaped by the places and communities in which we have lived and the histories that haunt them, Nowhere, Exactly examines with exquisite sensitivity the space between identity and belonging, the immigrant or exile’s experience of both loss and gain, and the weight of memory and nostalgia, and of guilt and hope felt by so many of those who leave their homes in search of new ones, for one reason or another.