Disorientation: Being Black in the World (Random House Canada), the latest book by Giller Prize–winning Trinidad-born writer Ian Williams, is a collection of essays inspired by James Baldwin, “in which the personal becomes the gateway to larger ideas.” Specifically, ideas about race and racism, and how these intersect in sometimes unexpected and uncomfortable ways with other aspects of identity. According to the publishers, Williams offers “a perspective distinct from the almost exclusively America-centric books on race topping the bestseller lists, because of one salient fact: he has lived in Trinidad (where he was never the only Black person in the room), in Canada (where he often was), and in the United States (where as a Black man from the Caribbean, he was a different kind of ‘only’).”