Haunting and atmospheric, this debut novel portrays the heartbreak, hardship and moments of surprising grace in the life of a man struggling to realize his destiny. A young man of astonishing promise when he emigrated from Ghana in 1955, Samuel Tyne was determined to accomplish great things. Fifteen long years later, he’s an insignificant government employee who hates his job when he unexpectedly inherits his uncle’s crumbling mansion in Aster, Alberta. Despite his wife’s resistance and the sullen complaints of his thirteen-year-old twin daughters, Samuel quits his job and moves his family to the town. For here, he believes, is that fabled second chance, and he is determined not to fail again. At first, Aster seems perfect — to Samuel, the formerly all-black town represents the return to a communal, idyllic way of life. But he soon discovers the town’s problems: a history of in-fighting, a strict town council and a series of mysterious fires that put all the townsfolk on edge. When his daughters cease speaking and refuse to explain their increasingly strange behaviour, Samuel turns more and more to the refuge of his electronics shop. As his ambitions intensify, the life he has struggled so hard to improve begins to disintegrate around him, and a dark current of menace in the town is turned upon the Tyne family.

Winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize Man Booker Prize Finalist 2011 An Oprah Magazine Best Book of the Year Shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction Berlin, 1939. The Hot Time Swingers, a popular jazz band, has been forbidden to play by the Nazis. Their young trumpet-player Hieronymus Falk, declared a musical genius by none other than Louis Armstrong, is arrested in a Paris café. He is never heard from again. He was twenty years old, a German citizen. And he was black. Berlin, 1952. Falk is a jazz legend. Hot Time Swingers band members Sid Griffiths and Chip Jones, both African Americans from Baltimore, have appeared in a documentary about Falk. When they are invited to attend the film's premier, Sid's role in Falk's fate will be questioned and the two old musicians set off on a surprising and strange journey. From the smoky bars of pre-war Berlin to the salons of Paris, Sid leads the reader through a fascinating, little-known world as he describes the friendships, love affairs and treacheries that led to Falk's incarceration in Sachsenhausen. Esi Edugyan's Half-Blood Blues is a story about music and race, love and loyalty, and the sacrifices we ask of ourselves, and demand of others, in the name of art.

MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST • ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW'S TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR • “A gripping historical narrative exploring both the bounds of slavery and what it means to be truly free.” —Vanity Fair Eleven-year-old George Washington Black—or Wash—a field slave on a Barbados sugar plantation, is initially terrified when he is chosen as the manservant of his master’s brother. To his surprise, however, the eccentric Christopher Wilde turns out to be a naturalist, explorer, inventor, and abolitionist. Soon Wash is initiated into a world where a flying machine can carry a man across the sky, where even a boy born in chains may embrace a life of dignity and meaning, and where two people, separated by an impossible divide, can begin to see each other as human. But when a man is killed and a bounty is placed on Wash’s head, they must abandon everything and flee together. Over the course of their travels, what brings Wash and Christopher together will tear them apart, propelling Wash ever farther across the globe in search of his true self. Spanning the Caribbean to the frozen Far North, London to Morocco, Washington Black is a story of self-invention and betrayal, of love and redemption, and of a world destroyed and made whole again.

An insightful exploration and moving meditation on identity, art, and belonging from one of the most celebrated writers of the last decade. What happens when we begin to consider stories at the margins, when we grant them centrality? How does that complicate our certainties about who we are, as individuals, as nations, as human beings? Through the lens of visual art, literature, film, and the author’s lived experience, Out of the Sun examines Black histories in art, offering new perspectives to challenge us. In this groundbreaking, reflective, and erudite book, two-time Scotiabank Giller Prize winner and internationally bestselling author Esi Edugyan illuminates myriad varieties of Black experience in global culture and history. Edugyan combines storytelling with analyses of contemporary events and her own personal story in this dazzling first major work of non-fiction.

Ten years, ten authors, ten critics. The Canadian Literature Centre/Centre de littérature canadienne reaches into its ten-year archive of Brown Bag Lunch readings to sample some of the most diverse and powerful voices in contemporary Canadian literature. This anthology offers readers samples from some of Canada’s most exciting writers of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Each selection is introduced by a brief essay, serving as a point of entry into the writer’s work. From the east coast of Newfoundland to Kitamaat territory on British Columbia’s central coast, there is a story for everyone, from everywhere. True to Canada’s multilingual and multicultural heritage, these ten writers come from diverse ethnicities and backgrounds, and work in multiple languages, including English, French, and Cree. Ying Chen | essay by Julie Rodgers Lynn Coady | essay by Maïté Snauwaert Michael Crummey | essay by Jennifer Bowering Delisle Caterina Edwards | essay by Joseph Pivato Marina Endicott | essay by Daniel Laforest Lawrence Hill | essay by Winfried Siemerling Alice Major | essay by Don Perkins Eden Robinson | essay by Kit Dobson Gregory Scofield | essay by Angela Van Essen Kim Thúy | essay by Pamela V. Sing

Comparing second generation children of immigrants in black Canadian and black British women’s writing, Settling Down and Settling Up extends discourses of diaspora and postcolonialism by expanding recent theory on movement and border crossing. While these concepts have recently gained theoretical currency, this book argues that they are not always adequate frameworks through which to understand second generation children who wish to reside "in place" in the nations of their birth. Considering migration and settlement as complex, interrelated processes that inform each other across multiple generations and geographies, Andrea Katherine Medovarski challenges the gendered constructions of nationhood and diaspora with a particular focus on Canadian and British black women writers, including Dionne Brand, Esi Edugyan, and Zadie Smith. Re-evaluating gender and spatial relations, Settling Down and Settling Up argues that local experiences, often conceptualized through the language of the feminine and the domestic in black women’s writings, are no less important than travel and border crossings.

A plague of rats, the end of philosophy, the cosmic chicken, and bars that don’t serve Plymouth Gin—is this the Apocalypse or is it just America? “The apocalypse is imminent,” thinks W. He has devoted his life to philosophy, but he is about to be cast out from his beloved university. His friend Lars is no help at all—he’s too busy fighting an infestation of rats in his flat. A drunken lecture tour through the American South proves to be another colossal mistake. In desperation, the two British intellectuals turn to Dogma, a semi-religious code that might yet give meaning to their lives. Part Nietzsche, part Monty Python, part Huckleberry Finn, Dogma is a novel as ridiculous and profound as religion itself. The sequel to the acclaimed novel Spurious, Dogma is the second book in one of the most original literary trilogies since Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable.