Longlisted for the Toronto Book Award

“Prismatic, poignant, and resilient. Chantal Braganza seamlessly extrapolates motherhood as identity, action, and definition. Story of Your Mother is a bewitching debut.”
—Scaachi Koul, author of Suckerpunch

"In Story of Your Mother, Chantal Braganza manages the extraordinary. This is a book that fuses profound and tender meditations on care with a potent and edifying insistence that its invisible politics be made visible. Braganza expertly renders poignant scenes of motherhood, then turns them into portals to urgent questions about family, migration, labour, and colonialism. This is a rich book, poetic and expansive, clear-eyed in its aim: Braganza inverts the question—what if motherhood wasn't the fixed thing to be examined, but the lens itself? Story of Your Mother deepens our vocabulary of motherhood by showing us connections that have always been there, right in front of us, the whole time."
—Elamin Abdelmahmoud, host of CBC’s Commotion


“[A] thoughtful exploration of the fact that we are — all of us — a product of stories: the ones we tell ourselves, and the ones that were told for us before we were old enough to realize what stories were.”
—Cassandra Drudi, Literary Review of Canada


“An expansive hybrid of memoir and essay exploring identity, labour and care, which manages to be both intellectually rigorous and compulsively readable.”
—Michelle Cyca, Globe and Mail

"An intimate collage of memory, culture, and family history; an eloquent meditation on the multitudes of selfdom. Braganza explores motherhood not as a universal experience, but as a structure open to boundless interpretation."
—Desmond Cole, author of The Skin We're In: A Year of Black Resistance and Power

“A stunning meditation on motherhood, identity and inheritance. Chantal blends personal history with incisive cultural critique seamlessly in prose that is both tender and profound. It’s an exceptionally empathetic work that is also incredibly honest. Chantal has written a deeply moving memoir that I’ll think about for years to come.”
—Sadiya Ansari, author of In Exile

“An origin story and motherhood memoir that defies simple answers to questions of identity, family and belonging, Chantal Braganza has written a truly beautiful and vital book. It’s a love letter to her child, but also to anyone inventing new language to tell their own story.”
—Rachel Giese, author of Boys: What It Means to Become a Man

“Chantal Braganza packs so much into this taut, tender, prismatic book. While the curious palimpsest of parenting is her ostensible subject, within that she secretes even more: sharp meditations on race, tourism, and labour; flickers of the artistic lineage within which she writes; delightful descriptions of food. Whether you're a parent or child or both, it will make you see the world in new ways. A remarkable debut.”
—Jason McBride, author of Eat Your Mind: The Radical Life and Work of Kathy Acker

“Sharp and smart and unsentimental—but full, packed to the brim, with a million different shades of love—Chantal Braganza’s Story of Your Mother brings together beginnings and endings, migrations and returns, food and family and history and colonialism, pregnancy and birth and mothering and labour, all in a story that flows like rivers seeking the same terminal sea.”
—andrea bennett, author of Hearty