Esi Edugyan

"Though "Half-Blood Blues" is a jazz book, its greatest strength lies more in the rhythms of its conversations and Griffiths' pitch-perfect voice than in any musical exchanges. A simple, one-word sentence that could be just an expletive - "Hell" - becomes so much more as Griffiths watches Nazis march into Paris under "that dancing black spider," and his dazed account of a band of weary survivors coalescing around Hiero's "Half-Blood Blues" is intoxicating enough to send you crate-digging through a record store's back room for anything like it. "This was it, this was everything," Griffiths says with a delirious awe that nearly excuses his unforgivable selfishness. "We was all of us free, brother. For that night at least, we was free." If there's a better description of jazz and its brilliant, in-the-moment power, you're not likely to find it."

"[N]imble storytelling. [Edugyan] tempers the plot's 'Casablanca'-style melodrama - did a wartime love triangle lead to Falk's betrayal? - with healthy doses of quotidian banter, admirably capturing the bickering camaraderie of the young musicians."

"History is at the core of Esi Edugyan's brilliant second novel, Half-Blood Blues. Told in the jazzy patter of Sid's first-person monologue, which makes the Nazis into 'Boots' and every woman a 'jane,' even the well-known prelude to war feels intensely lived in... Swinging back and forth between the eras, this book - which won Canada's Scotiabank Giller Prize - is both lively and imbued with regret..."

"Esi Edugyan's excellent Half-Blood Blues sets its sights on the jazz musicians who flourished in Berlin during the cabaret heyday of the Weimar Republic in the 1920s and found themselves endangered after Hitler's rise and Goebbels's proscription of what he called 'Jewish-Hottentot frivolity.' ... [A] tense, well-wrought novel."

"The story hurls us from Baltimore, to Berlin, to Paris, to an obscure Polish town - as breathlessly as that trumpet player finishing a long, heartfelt riff. From bleak, violent cityscapes, it shifts to the troubled souls of the musicians as they tend the pure flame of art and the impure fire of jealousy. It's history, and it's timeless."

"[A] bold imagining of a hitherto little-regarded corner of the black Diaspora..."

"[A] soaring, engaging work that brings to convincing imaginative life an all-but-forgotten segment of jazz history."

"[A] beautifully controlled novel."

"Edugyan has written a great book that will hit readers on a multitude of levels"

"[A] soaring, engaging work that brings to convincing imaginative life an all-but-forgotten segment of jazz history."

"Esi Edugyan's Half-Blood Blues was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize, and it's easy to see why. It's a wonderful, multi-faceted historical novel... As Edugyan inhabits the brain of a subtly presented everyman character, his story filled with life, longing, disasters and a sensual way of viewing music. Highly recommended."

"[Half-Blood Blues] leads the reader through a fascinating world alive with passion, music and the spirit of resistance."

"In Esi Edugyan's novel Half-Blood Blues, the narrator's inventive and free-flowing descriptions of jazz mimic the music itself. For readers unfamiliar with jazz or unimpressed by it, the explosion of color, verve, imagery and verbal idiosyncrasy in the book will in and of itself quicken the heartbeat and warm the insides.... An undeniably potent, soul-searching examination of friendship and trust."

"Edugyan's tour de force effectively captures the speech patterns of band members and thereby gets into the minds of her characters to relate their story with convincing realism. Her descriptions of Nazi harassment and the invading German army are truly terrifying... Literate readers with an interest in the era and particularly the jazz scene will especially enjoy this finely wrought work."

"Edugyan's characters are tragic and absolutely believable, and she compellingly unpeels the layers that Sid hides behind.... It is a beautifully executed, dark and jazzy masterpiece. Recommended."

"Half-Blood Blues is a richly rendered, poetic work... The storytelling is subtly hypnotic as we get pulled into the past lives of the principle characters, and the Europe of the late '30s and early '40s that is painted here - with its smoky jazz clubs and sidewalk bistros - is richly rendered. For a female author, Edugyan...deftly gets the cadence of men, and how they talk to one another, pitch-perfect. This makes Half-Blood Blues a startling crystalline read, and one can spend a few good hours just getting lost in the rhythm of the language and the backstory...A hot blooded novel certainly worthy of reading."

"It's easy to see why Edugyan's narrative was a finalist for the prestigious Man Booker Prize, with its velvety prose, fluid, and hip as jazz."

"Much of the power of this unforgettable novel comes from the way its racial themes echo. It is very difficult to perceive and articulate the twisted skein of emotion that is black experience - and yet that is just what Edugyan manages to do with this brilliantly conceived, gorgeously executed novel. It's a work that promises to lead black literature in a whole new direction."

"Half-Blood Blues shines with knowledge, emotional insight, and historical revisionism, yet it never becomes over-burdened by its research. The novel is truly extraordinary in its evocation of time and place, its shimmering jazz vernacular, its pitch-perfect male banter and its period slang. Edugyan never stumbles with her storytelling, not over one sentence."

"Edugyan makes fresh tracks in this richly imagined story."

"[A] powerful and atmospheric novel...I could hear clearly the voice of the narrator as it lifted off the page and feel his confusion and pain as it followed him through his life. This is one to watch and would be a memorable book group read."

"Half-Blood Blues is both an epic, sweeping tale and an intimate portrait of human frailty. The result is a compelling piece of work indeed."

"Half-Blood Blues is impressively evocative of period and place, and an effortlessly involving and dramatically unusual second novel"

"A superbly atmospheric prologue kick-starts a thrilling story about truth and betrayal... [A] brilliant, fast-moving novel."

"As befits a novel about music, Half-Blood Blues is a stylistic delight. Sequences set in the 1940s capture a rhythmic patois, while sequences set in the 1990s employ a considerably more formal, though richly inflected, voice. The novel is far more than an exercise in style, however. It is a quintessentially human story, rich in well-drawn characters, primal emotional conflict, and a battered, flawed camaraderie. It is an exploration of the impact of history on individuals, of how moments of grace get lost in a world of hatred, how fear imperils any sense of dignity, and how friendships can form between the most disparate people. It is a stunning, powerful read, a compelling story brilliantly told, and well-deserving of its inclusion on both the Man Booker Prize shortlist and this country's own Scotiabank Giller Prize longlist."

"Half-Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan is the most substantial work of fiction to incorporate successfully jazz within its pages since Rafi Zabor's The Bear Comes Home and is, in many ways, a more ambitious work than Zabor's ursine novel which won the 1998 PEN/Faulkner award for fiction."

"This is a novel of layers, too: a mystery, an examination of romantic and artistic failures and successes, a period piece, a celebration of jazz and, at times, an engaging delivery of vernacular poetry. Above all it is immensely readable..."

"While the rarely explored subject adds to the book's allure, what stands out most is its cadenced narration and slangy dialogue, as conversations, both spoken and unspoken, snap, sizzle, and slide off the page."

"Edugyan tells this incredibly rich story of music, politics, and personal betrayal both subtly and dramatically, unveiling the mystery of what happened to Falk as she exposes the tensions between the band members and the secret that has been gnawing at one of them for half a century...Edugyan's novel mixes palpable period atmosphere with an interpersonal drama of great emotional depth. That narrow moment in time when the freewheeling decadence of Weimar Germany gave way to jackbooted tyranny has been the subject of much fine fiction, but Edugyan is the first to overlay it with jazz history. It makes a sublime marriage ."

"A memorable evocation of the defiant thrill of jazz at a terrible time."

"The novel's surprising end, and Edugyan herself, are proof that the mischling experience beautifies art in all of its forms."