Dionne Brand, award-winning poet and novelist (In Another Place, Not Here; At the Full and Change of the Moon), is, like Michael Ondaatje, a transplant to Toronto who’s been at the heart of that city’s literary awakening. (You can add to them writers like Rohinton Mistry, M.G. Vassanji and David Bezmozgis.) But Brand, originally from Trinidad, is even more focused in her work on mapping out a new geography of Canada’s great melting pot—with its cross section of bustling streets and neighborhoods, like Bloor, Danforth and Kensington Market; new immigrants, from Somalis and Vietnamese to Sri Lankans and West Indians; and, above all, its bohemian mix of young artists, night owls and passionate searchers.

So, here, then, is her modern Toronto novel, as told through the lives of a small, incestuous group of multiculti twentysomethings. There’s Tuyen, a lesbian conceptual artist struggling to break free of her suburban Vietnamese family while lusting after Carla, the biracial bike messenger who happens to live next door. And there’s Oku, a Jamaican poet and college dropout, and his object of desire, Jackie, a sassy hip-hop boutique owner with a German punk-rock boyfriend. (Actually, Jackie’s parents’ story—black Nova Scotians who arrived in Toronto during the heyday of ’70s soul and black power—features the book’s most original material.)

There are occasional sparks of ingenuity as Brand’s bustling characters interact. Ultimately, though, What We All Long For suffers from the hodgepodge of skittish people and story lines, a zigzagging dash through contemporary Toronto. Only in flashes does Brand succeed in capturing, as Tuyen apparently does in her installations, something of “the beauty of this city, its polyphonic murmuring.”

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