Bøger af Esi Edugyan

Winner of the Scotiabank Giller PrizeMan Booker Prize Finalist 2011An Oprah Magazine Best Book of the YearShortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award for FictionBerlin, 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.

The first novel from the acclaimed author of Washington Black?an exploration of explores the sweep of history, the binds of blood, the challenges of middle age, and the pain of exile, witnessed through the experiences of one family whose hope blinds them to threatening forces that could tear them apart. It is 1968 and Samuel Tyne has lived in exile in the chaotic New World for more than a dozen years. Born in Ghana, educated at Oxford, Samuel was expected to accomplish great things. But the middling government employee fears he has fallen short of that promise. When he inherits a crumbling mansion in the small, provincial town of Aster, Canada, he packs up his protesting family, believing that he has been offered a fabled second chance?and this time, he will not fail.An all-white enclave that was originally settled by freed slaves and runaways from America, the idyllic Aster feels like a miracle. But as time passes, Samuel begins to see the town is not the haven he hoped: riven by political infighting, a community resistant to change, and most disturbing, a number of mysterious fires that have put the townsfolk on edge. His family, too, begins to splinter. Stubbornly clinging to his ambitious dreams, Samuel finds the successful life he's struggled to build is disintegrating around him, and a dark current of menace in the town is turned upon his family?that they may be too powerless to fight.

Hieronymous Falk, a rising star on the cabaret scene, was arrested in a cafe and never heard from again. Fifty years later, Sid, Hiero's bandmate and the only witness that day, is going back to Berlin. Persuaded by his old friend Chip, Sid discovers there's more to the journey than he thought when Chip shares a mysterious letter.

Home, for me, was not a birthright, but an invention. It seems to me when we speak of home we are speaking of several things, often at once, muddled together into an uneasy stew. We say home and mean origins, we say home and mean belonging. These are two different things: where we come from, and where we are. Writing about belonging is not a simple task. Esi Edugyan chooses to intertwine fact and fiction, objective and subjective in an effort to find out if one can belong to more than one place, if home is just a place or if it can be an idea, a person, a memory, or a dream. How "home" changes, how it changes us, and how every farewell carries the promise of a return. Readers of Canadian literature, armchair travellers, and all citizens of the global village will enjoy her explorations and reflections, as we follow her from Ghana to Germany, from Toronto to Budapest, from Paris to New York.