Téa Mutonji — My Person

Tania asks Margot to unknow her. They have been best friends for over twenty years, Margot's family owns the apartment Tania lives in, and the request arrives while the two of them are laying the table for their monthly dinner. My Person is Téa Mutonji's first novel, 288 pages, out August 11 from Putnam, seven years after the story collection Shut Up You're Pretty. Mutonji was born in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and raised in Scarborough, and she is exact about the Canadian shape of the problem: prejudice that arrives as extravagant generosity and quietly erodes whoever accepts it. The novel gives a friendship the psychological weight usually held for a marriage, then lets neither woman off.