A Catholic and a Jihadi Walk into a Storeroom…

Prin—Princely St. John Umbiligoda, son of Kingsley—is, much like his creator, Randy Boyagoda, a father of four daughters, the child of Sri Lankan parents, and an English professor at a Catholic college at the University of Toronto. Prin specializes in studying depictions of marine creatures in Canadian literature and makes frequent pointed references to Michael Ondaatje’s sea horse simile in The English Patient.

The novel opens provocatively with the line: “Eight months before he became a suicide bomber, Prin went to the zoo with his family.” Toasting the lemurs with a glass of sparkling juice after attending mass in a rundown Scarborough church has long been a New Year’s Day tradition for the family. This year, though, Prin has decided it will be a good location for revealing his prostate cancer diagnosis, and impending surgery, to his children. But when the zoo suffers a power outage and the whole family is trapped in the lemur house with another family...