Starry Starry Night, novel, Book*hug Press, Canada, 2025

Set in Trinidad in the Caribbean, just before and after the country’s independence in 1962, Starry Starry Night is the first-person narrative of Anju Goshal, from ages four to twelve. At age four Anju learns that her Ma and Pa, whom she has been living with, are not her parents but her grandparents. When her parents return to Trinidad from Ireland, where her father is studying medicine, she is expected to relocate and live with them and two siblings, all strangers to her. While preoccupied with their own dramas, the adults around her often fail to recognize the need of the children in their midst. This work of autofiction is a portrait of a child who, despite her privileged appearance, must ultimately fend for herself because her safety depends on it.

Eve Crocker of the Hamilton Review of Books writers: While Anju’s voice is exceptionally convincing, Mootoo purposefully draws attention to the novel as a crafted and collaged version of events. The combination of Mootoo’s presence as a skilled storyteller and Anju’s earnest, energetic voice creates an immersive and moving investigation of how, as children, we are shaped by the overlapping scales of family and national history.


Oh Witness Dey! poetry, Book*hug Press, Canada 2024.

Responding to persistent questions about where her ancestors originated, fifth generation Indo-Caribbean, Irish born Canadian Shani Mootoo explores in lyric fragments ideas of origins, ancestry percentages and journey narratives. They circumvent traditional conventions of style to find new routes toward understanding and invite the reader to witness history, displacements and the legacies of our inheritance.

In periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics, Kim Fahner says of Oh Witness Dey!: The craft, in all (Mootoo’s) poetry, is clear, and the great amount of thought and care that’s put into deciding where lines begin and end, and where they dance across the page—or even when the font changes in size—is poetic architecture of the highest order. 

  • A CBC Top Twenty Book, Poetry 2024.

  • Shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Memorial Poetry Award.

  • Finalist for The Big Other Book Award for Poetry, 2025.

  • Kim Fahner, Review of Oh Witness Dey!, Periodicities, August 2024.

  • Finalist for The Big Other Book Award for Poetry, 2025.

Cane | Fire, poetry, Book*hug Press, Canada, 2022.

A poetic memoir that braids the past with the present. Coursing through the author’s journey from her birth in Ireland to growing up in Trinidad and then emigration to Canada, Mootoo remembers, but she also questions the reliability of memory. Her own artwork contributes to this shaping and reshaping of the past and reimagining of the present.

“Shani Mootoo’s recursive rhythms entrap us. Here are portraits—ripped, coloured in, mirrored, crossed out, hybridized. Here is anti-history, fractal geography, ‘an escarpment of logic / a story told / falling.’ Cane | Fire is a powerful and deeply intelligent confrontation of self and what is sustained in the embers.” __Madhur Anand, Governor General’s Literary Award—winning author of This Red Line Goes Straight to Your Heart.

Polar Vortex, novel, Book*hug Press, Canada, 2020. (Reprinted Akashic Books, New York, 2020).

Are we ever free from our pasts? Can we ever truly know the people we are closest to? Seductive and tension-filled, Polar Vortex is a story of secrets, deceptions, and revenge set in a small resort town in Southern Ontario.

“Shani Mootoo’s intimate new novel suspends us in the vortex between acts of betrayal and acts of love. It is a powerfully unsettling work from a brilliant artist.”—Madeleine Thien, Booker shortlisted author of The Book of Records.

  • Shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize.

Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab, novel, Doubleday, Canada, 2014. (Reprinted Akashic Books, New York, 2017).

Set in the tropical landscape of Trinidad and the muted winter cityscape of Toronto, this novel is a passionate eulogy to a beloved parent, and a nuanced, moving tale about the struggle to embrace the complex realities of love and family ties.

“What does it mean to be a man? How do we tell our most intimate stories? In her provocative, sophisticated fourth novel, Shani Mootoo addresses these questions while reflecting on notions of home, identity, and personal empowerment.” —Quill and Quire.

  • Longlisted for the ScotiaBank Giller Prize.

  • Shortlisted for the Lambda Award.

Valmiki’s Daughter, novel, House of Anansi Press, Canada, 2008.

A father and daughter both conceal painful secrets. As the daughter, Viveka, gradually discovers the truth about herself, her struggle to break free threatens to unmask her socially prominent father and shake the foundations of her delicately calibrated society.

“A novel for both brain and heart: at once wise and smouldering…” Camilla GIibb

  • Longlisted for the ScotiaBank Giller Prize.

He Drown She in the Sea, novel, Grove Press, New York, 2005.

A love story of one man’s ambitions, failures, and triumphs, and an exploration of the origins of desire.

  • Longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

The Predicament of Or, poetry, Raincoast/Polestar Publishers, Canada, 2002.

An exploration of desire, identity and personal exile. In a series of bittersweet poems the contradictions of love are exposed; in a series o exhilarating riffs on language, words are married to Trinidad intonation.

“Mootoo has an impeccable ear. The plea for tolerance that lies at the heart of her work is both authentic and powerful”—New York Times Book Review.

Cereus Blooms at Night, novel, McClelland and Stewart Publishers, Canada, 1996. (Reprinted Penguin Modern Classic, New York, 2022; Reprinted Vintage Classics, UK, 2023).

Old Mala Ramchandin has been accused of murder. She won’t speak but hums distractedly. The judge at her trial is unconvinced of her guilt. He sentences her, for her safety, to a home for the aged. There, she is put in the care of the crossdressing nurse Tyler who, himself spurned by society, bonds with her, and slowly learns her story, and the truth of the supposed murder.

“Cereus Blooms at Night is dazzling…. Mootoo creates a dense, vocal and uniques Asian-Caribebean world of buried secrets and despeate memories, a hothouse in which stories grow as lushly as flowers.”--Books in Canada.

“A swirling cauldron of cross-generational history filled with violence, romance, aching beauty, and heat-breaking mystery.”--Soujourner

“Strong, sad and sensual…Cereus Blooms at Night is wrought as deftly as a piece of lacework…A confident and lively first novel.”—Los Angeles Times.

  • Shortlisted for the Giller Prize.

  • Shortlisted for the Chapters First Novel Award.

  • Shortlisted for the Ethel Wilson Book Prize.

  • Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

  • Published in sixteen countries, translated into eleven languages.

Out on Main Street, short story collection, Press Gang Publishers, Canada, 1993.

In Shani Mootoo’s first published work of fiction are the seeds of the subjects that would come to define her oeuvre. The insistence on self-definition (A Garden of her Own), the intricacies for good and for ill of family ties (Wake Up), navigating the narrow space of race and class in society (the title story Out on Main Street), are some of the themes played out in the nine stories, some set in Trinidad, some in Canada.

“Shani Mootoo explores racial and religious diversity, and ambiguities of gender, to pose fundamental questions about who each of us is… A fine new talent to be welcomed and rejoiced in.”—Jane Rule.

Stack of books by Shani Mootoo on a wooden surface outdoor. Titles include: Starry Starry Night, Oh Witness Dey!, Cane|Fire, Polar Vortex, Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab, Valmiki's Daughter, He Drown She in the Sea, and others