Promotional Information

A story of friendship, betrayal and redemption, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2011

About the Author

Esi Edugyan has degrees from the University of Victoria and Johns Hopkins University. Her work has appeared in several anthologies, including Best New American Voices 2003. Her debut novel, written when she was 25, The Second Life of Samuel Tyne, was published internationally. She currently lives in Victoria, British Columbia.

Reviews

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

Assured, vivid and persuasive... Impressively evocative of period and place, and an effortlessly involving and dramatically unusual second novel.
*Time Out*

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 Hieronymus Falk on Wikipedia, disbelieving he was the product of one woman's imagination
*Attica Locke*

Edugyan really can write... redemptive
*Guardian*

Mesmerising... Edugyan has a perfect ear for conversations and the confusions of human love and jealousy... moving... A remarkable novel.
*Morning Star*

Ingenious...
*Daily Telegraph*

A mature, moving second novel was very deservedly shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize this week... 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.
*Independent*

This is a wonderful, vibrant, tense novel about war and its aftermath. Its author has brought both the wartime past of a devastated city and its confident reinvention of itself in a new era to life with extraordinary assurance.
*Man Booker Prize judge*

Half Blood Blues shines with knowledge, emotional insight, and historical revisionism, yet it never becomes overburdened by its research. The novel is truly extraordinary in its evocation of time and places, its shimmering jazz vernacular, its pitch-perfect male banter and its period slang.
*Canberra Times, Australia*

Sid's voice... is a triumph of vernacular writing and convincingly captures the mood of the late jazz age in Europe... punchy and atmospheric.
*Sunday Times*

Powerful and effortlessly written
*Pride*

A densely researched tale musing on timeless themes of jealousy and betrayal.
*Daily Mail*

A story so rich in texture, so deeply felt and imagined, that from the first, savoury sentences, you're hooked... Taught, evocative and utterly convincing.
*The Lady*

Edugyan's ventriloquism is a compelling, personal and authentic, her story deeply researched
*Observer*

A moving, lyrical exploration of the plight of mixed-race immigrants rendered stateless by the Second World War
*Country Life*

A great and original novel... tense, richly humorous and enjoyable [On the audio book edition]
*Independent on Sunday*

Ingenious - and the hip period slang is pitch-perfect. [On the audio book edition]
*Guardian*

The novel is held together by Edugyan's masterly wielding of the narrative voice - a voice so constant and commanding in its articulation, so firm and assured in its rhythms, that the splintered story takes on its own enchanting rhythm... enthralling... a captivating novel of music, memory and storytelling.
*TLS*

Evocative, articulate, and with a melancholy rhythm that will tease the jazz out of any reader's soul, Half Blood Blues is a masterpiece of storytelling and humanity
*Cape Times*

Triumphant... a zany, original, sad, funny, eccentric, wild novel that is a constant and refreshing surprise... The novel resounds with the sound of jazz. It is a tense, nervy book, about betrayal and regret, a crime novel about male bonding and ambition. It shows that women can write about men as well as men can - and why not?
*Mslexia*

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

Edugyan's second novel, shortlisted for the 2011 Man Booker Prize, pays a mournful tribute to the Hot-Time Swingers, a once-legendary six-piece German-American multiracial jazz ensemble gigging in Berlin on the eve of WWII. When the pianist is picked up by the Gestapo, the remaining members flee to Paris with forged passports to meet Louis Armstrong in hopes of cutting a record. After the German occupation of Paris, "the Boots" arrest Hieronymous ("Hiero") Falk, the band's 20-year-old-genius Afro-German trumpet player, leaving the band with one half-finished record, one shattered love affair, and one too many secrets. The story of the band's demise and partial resurrection, as seen through the eyes of Sid Griffiths-the upright bass player-unfolds in richly scripted vignettes alternating between 1939/1940 (when Hiero disappears) and 1992 (when Sid and Chip Jones, the percussionist, revisit Berlin for a Hieronymous Falk festival and walk down memory lane). By the book's end, readers will have pieced together most of the truth behind Sid's biased recounting of events, but nothing will prepare them for the disclosure of an ultimate betrayal. 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. Sid's motivation can feel obscure, but his lessons learned are hard-won all the same. Agent: Anne McDermid, Anne McDermid Associates. (Feb. 28) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Edugyan (The Second Life of Samuel Tyne) has crafted a fictional account of a German American jazz band-the Hot-Time Swingers-that the Nazis banned from performing because of its "degenerate" music. The story flashes forward and backward between 1939 and 1992, when one of its members, the half-black Hieronymus Falk, though absent, is being honored in Berlin by a documentary. Two former black band members, Chip and Sid, attend the ceremonies, at which time we learn of a dark secret involving Falk's imprisonment in Mauthausen concentration camp. The novel follows band members as they escape from Hitler's Germany to France but then must face the Wehrmacht as it invades Paris. The great Louis Armstrong makes a convincing cameo appearance. Verdict A Man Booker finalist, 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. The only drawback, and it may be a big one, is that the entire book is written in nonstandard English, which can make for hard reading. Still, literate readers with an interest in the era and particularly the jazz scene will especially enjoy this finely wrought work.-Edward Cone, New York (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.