Coconut Dreams

Linked short story collection available from Book*hug. It can also be purchased via All Lit Up, Amazon, Independent Canadian bookstores, and all major audiobook platforms. The French language edition is available from Éditions L'Interligne.

Coconut Dreams explores the lives of the Pinto family through seventeen linked short stories. Starting with a ghost story set in Goa, India in the 1950s, the collection weaves through various timelines and perspectives to focus on two children, Aiden and Ally Pinto. These siblings tackle their adventures in a predominantly white suburb with innocence, intelligence and a timid foot in two distinct cultures. Derek Mascarenhas takes a fresh look at the world of the new immigrant and the South Asian experience in Canada. In these stories, a daughter questions her father’s love at an IKEA grand opening; an aunt remembers a safari-gone-wrong in Kenya; an uncle’s unrequited love is confronted at a Goan Association picnic; a boy tests his faith amidst a school-yard brawl; and a childhood love letter is exchanged during the building of a backyard deck. Singularly and collectively, these stories will move the reader with their engaging narratives and authentic voices.

Praise for Coconut Dreams:

“This charming collection of stories resides between a suburban childhood in Canada and inherited, often mythic, tales from Goa that belong to the elders. Characters decide on love with rings lost at sea and soothe babies with stories of elephants in mountains. The voices in these stories are from people who seem far away and yet are inside us. Prepare to be delighted.”
—Kim Echlin, author of Under the Visible Life

“The stories in Derek Mascarenhas’s Coconut Dreams remind one of the high stakes in a child’s world, the way that danger looms just fractionally outside safety. Like all proper enchantments, these vignettes are dark, light, strange, and vivid such that they delight and charm in equal portions.”
—Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, author of All the Broken Things

“In this evocative collection, Derek Mascarenhas takes up the fictional Pinto family and turns it gently in his hands, revealing new truths—and new questions—with every shift in point of view. A moving, multifaceted debut.”
—Alissa York, author of The Naturalist

“Mascarenhas writes with precision, shifting from one character’s perspective to another’s with an ease that is admirable and engrossing. What is most fascinating about these stories is their accuracy at depicting ways in which children come to understand painful truths: often accidentally, sometimes the hard way.” —Sheniz Janmohamed, Quill and Quire

“An epic work in short-story form, Derek Mascarenhas’ Coconut Dreams transcends space, time and culture in [these] interconnected tales… Mascarenhas imbues his stories with human connection, whether through chance encounters, brief friendships or unbreakable family bonds…” —Postmedia

Coconut Dreams is a story collection that reads like a novel —Jade Colbert, The Globe and Mail

“Coconut Dreams signals the arrival of a new Canadian voice that is singular, necessary, and hard to forget.” —Shazia Hafiz Ramji, Humber Literary Review

“The stories in Coconut Dreams by Derek Mascarenhas move me to want to be a better storyteller. Throughout, he finds the perfect words that make me stop mid-sentence and marvel at how a writer can quietly stun a reader into holding their breath just with language.” —Jenny Heijun Wills, Writers’ Trust of Canada 2019 Best Books of the Year: Recommended Reading Lists