A two-time Giller Prize-winning novelist, Esi Edugyan takes us on a magical and emotional journey through history. This one-of-a-kind novel imagines the experiences, and eventual erasure, of black and multiracial bodies in Berlin and Paris during WWII. It focuses on a group of jazz musicians who, performing during the Nazi occupation, find their freedom and creative expression called into question and their very existencemade perilous. The story is foregrounded by Sid, narrating from the present day, who sees a documentary in honor of "Hiero" Falk, a musician who had been captured and was presumed dead--only to be found living in Poland. We follow Sid as he visits Falk and is forced to reckon with a decades-old secret of betrayal. Edugyan's spare but musical prose lends a hint of dreaminess and hope that kept me wanting more.
(This book cannot be returned.)
A genre-defying work of auto-fiction, Zambreno's Drifts follows the musings and observations of an unnamed narrator as she spends her days "folding time into a book" to maximize her experience of ordinary life--or merely to avoid working on her novel. Guided by the likes of Rilke, Lispector, and Dürer, Zambreno's protagonist lets her writing languish, but Zambreno draws on her own creative history to portray the restless energy of artistic pursuit, including the concomitant struggle with nothingness.
