In The Worlds Within Her Neil Bissoondath picks up where he left off in his previous fiction – chronicling the small, crucial emotional turning points in ordinary lives. When we first meet Bissoondath’s protagonist Yasmin, a TV anchorperson and first generation immigrant to Canada, she is on her way back to the Caribbean island where she was born. She’s bringing her mother’s ashes with her.

The story of Yasmin’s troubled life is told through a complex layer of flashbacks and flashforwards. But the main action takes place in the Caribbean (on an unnamed island that is probably not unlike Bissoondath’s own native Trinidad) and it concerns Yasmin’s reluctant encounter with her past – with a secretive mother, a father who was assassinated for his political activities, and the remaining family members who have their own version of the truth and of the past.

Juxtaposed against this latticework of memories and misunderstandings, there is the more straightforward and chronological story related by Yasmin’s mother, Shakti. Bissoondath alternates between Shakti’s engaging first person point of view and the more impersonal third person point of view employed in the rest of the novel, and it’s the contrasts and contradictions between the mother’s and the daughter’s versions of family history that give The Worlds Within Her its richness and texture.

Some of the themes at the heart of Bissoondath’s 1994 bestseller, Selling Illusions, a controversial critique of multiculturalism and identity politics in this country, find their way into this novel, albeit peripherally. Bissoondath makes sure they take a backseat to the themes of personal betrayal and secret histories that preoccupy the novel’s cast. Everyone in the novel resists stereotyping; in fact, everyone has many more facets to them than they initially appear to – like Yasmin’s Uncle Cyril who is inaccurately seen as a buffoon by his family members. Cyril’s story, like the others in the book, becomes broader and deeper as it unfolds.

“Storytelling is not a luxury to humanity,” the American novelist Robert Stone has said, “it’s almost as necessary as bread.” This is a sentiment with which Bissoondath would agree. In the end, The Worlds Within Her is a novel about storytelling – about the infinite variety of secrets and possibilities we all carry within us.