Book of the Month–March 2012 |

Half-Blood Blues
By: Esi Edugyan

One night in Paris, star trumpet player Hieronymous Falk is taken into German custody and is not seen again. Falk is a member of The Hot Time Swingers, a jazz band composed of African American and German members, popular in the nightclubs of 1939 Berlin. Jazz, however, is less popular with the Nazis who consider it a degenerate form of music. Hiero has another strike against him. He is a “Rhineland Bastard”–the child of a French African father and a white German mother. This population was considered a threat to the racial purity of Germany and members were sometimes forcibly sterilized.

The band flees to Paris believing that they will be safer there, but the city soon falls and Hiero disappears. Only rumours of his whereabouts ever surface. Fifty years later, band members Sid Griffiths and Chip Jones return to Europe, hoping to uncover the truth about Hiero’s disappearance and to finally make peace with the past.

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Acknowledgements and Awards
2011 Scotiabank Giller Prize
2011 Governor General’s Literary Award (finalist)
2011 Man Booker Prize (finalist)
2011 Roger’s Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize (finalist)

Book Reviews
CBC Books
The Globe and Mail
The Guardian
The National Post
Quill and Quire

About the Author
Esi Edugyan was born in Calgary, the child of Ghanaian immigrants. She began writing poetry in high school and eventually went on to study creative writing at the University of Victoria. While there, she met her future husband, novelist and poet Steven Price. Her first novel, The Second Life of Samuel Tyne, was published in 2004, but she could not secure a publisher for her follow-up book. She took a position as a writer-in-residence in Stuttgart, Germany, where she found the inspiration for Half-Blood Blues.