Half-Blood Blues

"Shines with knowledge, emotional insight, and historical revisionism . . . Truly extraordinary in its evocation of time and place, its shimmering jazz vernacular, its pitch-perfect male banter and its period slang."—The Independent

"A superbly atmospheric prologue kick-starts a thrilling story about truth and betrayal . . . [A] brilliantly fast-moving novel."—The Times (London)

"Ingenious."—The Daily Telegraph (London)

"Assured, vivid, and persuasive . . . Impressively evocative of period and place, and an effortlessly involving and dramatically unusual second novel."—Sharon O'Connell, Time Out (London)

"Mesmerizing . . . Edugyan has a perfect ear for conversations and the confusions of human love and jealousy . . . Moving . . . A remarkable novel."—The Morning Star (London)

"With Half-Blood Blues, Esi Edugyan has written a truly beautiful novel. With perfect pitch, and brilliantly in tune with the diction, musicality, suffering, and dignity of Black jazz musicians trying to survive in France and Germany during World War II, and to hold their lives together in the aftermath of horror, it is both taut and expansive, like perfect jazz. Exquisite language, throughout."—Lawrence Hill, award-winning author of Someone Knows My Name

"Simply stunning, one of the freshest pieces of fiction I've read. A story I'd never heard before, told in a way I'd never seen before. I felt the whole time I was reading it like I was being let in on something, the story of a legend deconstructed. It's a world of characters so realized that I found myself at one point looking up Hieronymus Falk on Wikipedia, disbelieving he was the product of one woman's imagination."—Attica Locke, author of Black Water Rising

"The characters in Esi Edugyan's stunning novel bring to mind Mark Twain, who understood characters like these . . . The language of Edugyan's narrative moves us with its intrinsic power, grace, and soulful jazz cadences. Half-Blood Blues is an engrossing and unforgettable story."—Austin Clarke, author of The Polished Hoe and More

"Half-Blood Blues offers a gripping and original portrait of the stateless, those 'lost in the dark maw of history,' but whose stories are proving ever more crucial for citizens today. Yet, for me, the real allure of the novel is the mongrel and enduring beauty of its language. Like a gifted jazz performer. Esi Edugyan knows how to make new phrasings and cadences hit big upon the heart."—David Chariandy, author of Soucouyant

"Unforgettable . . . Brilliantly conceived, gorgeously executed. It's a work that promises to lead Black literature in a whole new direction."—The Globe and Mail (Toronto)

"Destined to win a wide audience . . . Deftly paced in incident and tone, moving from scenes of snappy dialogue, in which band members squabble and banter humorously, to tense, atmospheric passages of description . . . Edugyan makes fresh tracks in this richly-imagined story . . . Half-Blood Blues itself represent a kind of flowering—that of a gifted storyteller."—The Toronto Star

"[Edugyan's] style is deceptively conversational and easy, but with the simultaneous exuberance and discipline of a true prodigy. Put this book next to Louis Armstrong's West End Blues—these two works of art belong together."—Jury's Citation, Scotiabank Giller Prize

"In Edugyan's novel . . . some jazz musicians find their music and lives endangered in Nazi Germany and occupied Paris . . . They arrived in swinging Berlin in the 1920's and joined forces with three German players. Years later, one of the Germans discovered a jazz prodigy, Hieronymus Falk . . . Trumpeter Hiero fronts for the band and is the central character. He's mixed race, but it's hard to remember he's German when we only hear him use Black American slang. He's also a student of the classics and reads Herodotus. All this is a heavy burden for young shoulders, and it's hard to locate the individual inside the mystique. That mystique, however, causes Louis Armstrong, in 1939, to summon Hiero and the band to Paris to cut a record. His emissary is the beautiful, light-skinned singer Delilah, with whom Sid falls disastrously in love. Another disaster ensues when he messes up at the recording session; but Hiero soars, leading Satchmo to call him Little Louis . . . A memorable evocation of the defiant thrill of jazz at a terrible time."—Kirkus

"Edugyan's novel . . . pays a mournful tribute to the Hot-Time Swingers, a once-legendary six-piece German-American multiracial jazz ensemble gigging in Berlin on the eve of WWII. When the pianist is picked up by the Gestapo, the remaining members flee to Paris with forged passports to meet Louis Armstrong in hopes of cutting a record. After the German occupation of Paris, "the Boots" arrest Hieronymus Falk, the band's 20-year-old-genius Afro-German trumpet player, leaving the band with one half-finished record, one shattered love affair, and one too many secrets. The story of the band's demise and partial resurrection, as seen through the eyes of Sid Griffiths—the upright bass player—unfolds in richly scripted vignettes alternating between 1939 and 1992. By the book's end, readers will have pieced together most of the truth behind Sid's biased recounting of events, but nothing will prepare them for the disclosure of an ultimate betrayal."—Publishers Weekly