This is a beautiful book about duty, faith, and the search for self-awareness, and how they are all related whether we know it or not. Like Jesus who is given the life of a husband and father as a temptation, Karsan yearns for the ordinary, but unlike Jesus, Karsan's final choice is made for him by fate or chance.

Sometimes it is only when we are stripped down to nothing, or hit bottom, that we truly begin to understand ourselves and where we belong in the world. Vassanji doesn't tell us what to believe; he merely shows us the various stages of a person's exploration of self. At the conclusion, where we might have expected the prodigal son to return and take up his destiny, we are left without the certainty of a final ending.

Endings only come with death, not while we still live; that, more than any other, is the lesson Karsan has learned from his travels. From what he's seen of the world, and the ruinous consequences of people being certain their way is the only right way, perhaps a little uncertainty, a little doubt, is what the world needs more than anything else.

Canadian readers can buy The Assassin's Song either directly from Random House Canada or from an online retailer like Amazon.ca.