In a book club and starting to plan your reads for next year? Check out our 2025 picks.

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:
  • Readers' Rating:
  • Published:
  • Feb 2012, 336 pages
  • Rate this book

  • Buy This Book

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

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

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.

Reader Reviews

Write your own reviewwrite your own review

Donna C. (Chandler, AZ)

Superb
As a lifelong blues/jazz fan I couldn't wait to read this book after I read about it over a month ago. It was so well worth the wait! What a terrific book. Edugyan captures the tone, rhythm and feel of the characters, their dialog and narrative. And he creates a real sense of time and place, particularly the episodes that take place in Nazi Germany. Even so you can really feel the contrasting atmospheres of fear (of the Nazis) and freedom (of the music). This book superbly combines the worlds of music, history, mystery and literary fiction. I highly recommend "Half-Blood Blues". It is well written, original and enjoyable with memorable characters.

Vy A. (Phoenix, AZ)

Half-Blood Blues
Berlin 1939. Paris 1940. Amidst this pre war-time setting, The Half-Time Swingers, a German-American Jazz band forms. This novel is a story of music and friendship and how both can fill men’s souls, especially the black “swingers” who form a bond that lasts a lifetime. It is also the story of a secret that lies hidden with Sid Griffiths for fifty years until he has to face his past at an unexpected reunion.

The relationship between Sid and his childhood Baltimore friend Chip is the basis of the story and their dialogue (banter), in what one review calls German American slang, is delightful to read, filled with witticisms and wisdom. For example, “Ain’t no man can outrun his fate,” or “when the past comes to collect what you owe.”
Author Edugyan also makes great use of figurative language that is fresh and vivid, such as, “...gents with faces as worn as old dish rags,”and “...his booming voice, when he talked, it overwhelmed the air, shoved it aside like oil in a cup of water.”

Jazz lovers will like the touch of Louis Armstrong in the story and history buffs will appreciate yet another perspective of Nazi Germany where jazz has been banned as degenerate music and blacks face their own brand of discrimination. A great title for a good read which I can recommend.

William Y. (Lynchburg, VA)

Half-Blood Blues: A Review
American novels about jazz are few and far between, and even fewer have endured or achieved significant popularity. Esi Edugyan’s Half-Blood Blues may never climb to the top of best-seller lists, but her novel might well claim a lasting place among books that deal with jazz, both the music and its players.

Sid Griffiths, bassist with the Hot-Time Swingers, an American group performing in Europe on the eve of World War II, narrates this elegiac tale of lost love and the search for redemption. Spanning the years a 1939 to 1940, and occasionally moving to 1992 for a retrospective look backward, Edugyan sets the novel in Berlin, Paris, and rural Poland. She has Griffiths speak in the black jazz argot of the late 1930s, and although purists might quibble at the accuracy of his dialect, he serves as an engrossing storyteller, sensitive, regretful, and insecure.

In the course of his narration, Griffiths introduces numerous characters, both men (“Jacks” or “gates,” the latter a term for male musicians), and women (“Janes”), but he avoids the racial and gender stereotyping too often found in writing about jazz artists and their lifestyles. Much of the story revolves around Hieronymus Falk, a brilliant young trumpeter who becomes almost legendary thanks to his playing on a recording, seemingly lost, of Half-Blood Blues, cut while Europe collapsed into the flames of war. In fact, some of Edugyan’s best prose occurs in a set piece covering the fall of France in 1940 with its ensuing chaos and the resultant German occupation. Narrator Griffiths never refers to the Germans troops as Nazis, but instead refers to them as “the Boots,” a uniquely accurate term as they march from conquest to conquest.

A fine novel, Half-Blood Blues deserves a wide audience.

Eileen P. (Pittsford, NY)

Marvelous historical fiction
If you are at all interested in jazz, love, or how obsession can cloud your thinking, this book is for you. It is stylistically amazing. Edugyan uses a distinct voice for each of the two time periods the story is set in. And what an amazing story it is. Vivid and moving. It is like a kaleidoscope. As the story progresses little bits of information are revealed that change how the reader sees everything that has goes on before. It would be an outstanding book group selection.

Suri F. (Durham, NC)

Unique View, Wonderful Storytelling
What an outstanding book you have helped me discover! The subject of the book, jazz era musicians in Germany and Vichy France at the onset of WWII was one I had never considered before. Nor have I ever read anything before that gave me so much insight into the musical conversation that takes place in improvisation. I only want to know who will do the movie?

Portia A. (Mount Laurel, NJ)

A really good book
1939 Berlin.. Not a good time to be a Jazz band..Hitler has banned the music as degenerate; the times are getting worse. And their star trumpeter is a young black German. Out of this premise the author has written a brilliant book.
The jargon of the jazz men rings true as does the evocation of the war time. I recommend it.

...7 more reader reviews

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

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

Other books by Esi Edugyan at BookBrowse
  • Washington Black jacket
Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

More Recommendations

Readers Also Browsed . . .

more literary fiction...

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Top Picks

  • Book Jacket
    The House of Doors
    by Tan Twan Eng
    Every July, I take on the overly ambitious goal of reading all of the novels chosen as longlist ...
  • Book Jacket: The Puzzle Box
    The Puzzle Box
    by Danielle Trussoni
    During the tumultuous last days of the Tokugawa shogunate, a 17-year-old emperor known as Meiji ...
  • Book Jacket
    Something, Not Nothing
    by Sarah Leavitt
    In 2020, after a lifetime of struggling with increasingly ill health, Sarah Leavitt's partner, ...
  • Book Jacket
    A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens
    by Raul Palma
    Raul Palma's debut novel A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens introduces Hugo Contreras, who came to the ...

Members Recommend

  • Book Jacket

    Pony Confidential
    by Christina Lynch

    In this whimsical mystery, a grumpy pony must clear his beloved human's name from a murder accusation.

Who Said...

You can lead a man to Congress, but you can't make him think.

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Wordplay

Solve this clue:

H I O the G

and be entered to win..

Your guide toexceptional          books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.