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."

"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] beautifully controlled novel."

"A brilliantly conceived, gorgeously executed novel."

"Half Blood Blues itself represents a kind of flowering - that of a gifted storyteller"

"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."

"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."

"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 Two, and to hold their lives together in the aftermath of horror. It is both taut and expansive, like great jazz. Exquisite language, throughout. And did I say beautiful?"

"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."

"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 Hieronymous Falk on Wikipedia, disbelieving he was the product of one woman's imagination"

"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."