Canadian Author Gains a World Wide Audience

His books are being read in the UK, Europe, South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, India, Kenya, Brazil, and USA. In Canada, a few Indie bookstores like Ben McNally (Toronto) and A Different Drummer (Burlington) carry his books on consignment. “I hope to persuade Indigo Books to carry them at least in some stores,” Braz Menezes says, “because the stories are very relevant to Canada’s transition to a multicultural society.”

The latest of his Matata* Trilogy: “Among the Jacaranda – Buds of Matata in Kenya” will be launched in Mississauga this week.  The guest list is closed because of seating capacity. 

At 79, Braz Menezes is a young man in a hurry.Braz Menezes was born in British-ruled Kenya to parents from Goa, India (then Portuguese India). In 2007, while sitting on a beach in Cuba, he observed his then 9 year-old granddaughter, making notes as she was going to write a story about her holiday. He wished he had recorded some stories of his youth. He took a decision.

He decided to chronicle his experience of living through the last fifty years of Imperial power in the Portuguese and British Empires, in the Matata Series. (*Matata means trouble in Kiswahili).

Braz enrolled in Creative Writing at George Brown College and attended the mentorship program at Humber College in Toronto.

He and his family arrived as  Canadian Landed Immigrants into Canada in 1976. He was later recruited by the World Bank (Washington DC) to work in their Urban Sector.He has travelled extensively in Brazil, Mexico, Egypt, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and South Korea, among other countries.

His debut novel Just Matata: Sin, Saints and Settlers (2011) was expanded and issued as a Second Edition titled Beyond the Cape – Sin, Saints, Slaves, and Settlers (2015). Book Two of the Matata Trilogy titled More Matata: Love after the Mau Mau followed in 2012. Both have received a dozen 5-star reviews on Amazon.

Braz Menezes credits his success in relating to his far-flung audience on the advent of social media and e-book platforms that make it possible to reach readers in the furthest corners, where the Kenyan diaspora have found refuge.

Example: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/id1421252914

Braz can be reached at matatabooks@gmail.com  http://matatabooks.com

To buy the book on Amazon, click here: Jacaranda 

Just Matata

Just Matata

Matata means trouble in Swahili. Just Matata Sins, Saints and Settlers is a novel about growing up in Kenya and Goa in the 1940s.
Braz Menezes is the author of this breezy novel that narrates the life and times of colonial Kenya where the hero of the novel Chico lands in the early 20^th century.
Chico’s son Lando is the narrator of the story of the family’s lives in colonial Kenya under the British and in colonial Goa under the Portuguese.

Just Matata is the first part of a trilogy. If the first novel is any indication, the other two that will follow will be as good.

Braz Menezes

I’m reading the book right now and find it at once evocative and hilarious; it’s a delight although I have no connection to either Goa or East Africa.
(But my friend Jasmine will argue that I like the book because I have connections to Bombay's Dhobi Talao)

For those with connections or nostalgia about either of the places, the book will be an absolute delight to read.

Braz is an emerging writer in Toronto and his work has been published in Canadian Voices Volume 1 & 2, Goa Masala, Indian Voices and the forthcoming Canadian Imprints.

The novel was released last month and I bought it at The Word on the Street, where Braz was enthusiastically selling it.

For more information about the book and how to order your copy, click here: Just Matata

Images: http://www.matatatrilogy.com/

Creativity has many voices

Canadian Voices II has a hundred pieces of creativity – short stories and poems.

As with any collection, some are strikingly good to read.

I haven’t finished reading the collection yet. Of what I have read, the following short stories stand out for giving me that “aa..haa!” moment.

Chester & Grace by Cassie McDaniel
A Black Snowball by Braz Menezes
A Blue Fish by Yoko Morgenstern
The Devil’s Stone Cook by Joyce Wayne

And among the poems, these are the better ones:

Instructions by Elizabeth Barnes
The Great Depression by Jasmine D’Costa
On Un-making Contact by Deena Kara Shaffer
Apology by Sarah Zahid
&
I, Too, Am Canadian by Jasmine Jackson which ends with these memorable lines:

So please do not take my accent or the darker hue of my skin
For mistaking me to be any less Canadian

Publishers:
Bookland Press, Toronto 6021 Yonge Street, Suite 1010, Toronto ON M2M 3W2 Tel: (800) 535-1774, Website: http://www.booklandpress.com/, E-mail: books@booklandpress.com
ISBN: 978-0-9784395-8-3, 360 pages, $25.95

Images: Jasmine: http://www.bhasvic.ac.uk/student_life/press/press_10.htm