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Book Summary and Reviews of Half-Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan

Half-Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan

Half-Blood Blues

A Novel

by Esi Edugyan

  • Critics' Consensus (6):
  • Readers' Rating (13):
  • Published:
  • Feb 2012, 336 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

Winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize
Man Booker Prize Finalist 2011
Shortlisted for the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction

Berlin, 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.

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.

Paperback original

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"Starred Review. 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." - Publishers Weekly

"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)

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

"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 (London)

"Ingenious." - The Daily Telegraph (London)

"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

This information about Half-Blood Blues was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

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Author Information

Esi Edugyan Author Biography

Photo: © Tamara Poppitt

Esi Edugyan is author of the novels The Second Life of Samuel Tyne and Half-Blood Blues, which won the Scotiabank Giller Prize, was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize, the Governor General's Literary Award, the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, and the Orange Prize. She lives in Victoria, British Columbia.

Name Pronunciation
Esi Edugyan: first name sounds like the initials S E. Last name sounds like eh-dee-jan

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