Esi Edugyan

"Originally published in hardcover in Canada by Patrick Crean Editions, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd., Toronto, in 2018"--Copyright page.

Washington Black

Two-time Scotiabank Giller Prize winner and internationally bestselling author Esi Edugyan delivers an incisive analysis of the relationship between race and art. Out of the Sun examines Black histories filtered through and depicted in art, and shows how new perspectives upend the larger, known narrative. History is a construction. What happens when we begin to consider stories at the margins, when we grant them a centrality? How does that complicate our certainties about who we are, as individuals, as nations, as human beings?

Out of the Sun: On Art, Race, and the Future

Berlin, 1939. The Hot-Time Swingers, a popular German American jazz band, have been forbidden to play live because the Nazis have banned their "degenerate" music. After escaping to Paris, where they meet Louis Armstrong, the band's brilliant young trumpet player, Hieronymus Falk, is arrested in a cafe by the Gestapo. It is June 1940. He is never heard from again. He is twenty years old, a German citizen. And he is black. Berlin, 1992. Falk, now a jazz legend, is the subject of a celebratory documentary. Two of the original Hot-Time Swingers American band members, Sid Griffiths and Chip Jones, are invited to attend the film's premier in Berlin. As they return to the landscape of their past friendships, rivalries, loves, and betrayals, Sid - the only witness to Falk's disappearance who has always refused to speak about what happened - is forced to break his silence. Sid re-creates the lost world of Berlin's prewar smoky bars, and the salons of Paris, telling his vibrant and suspenseful story in German American slang. Half-Blood Bluesis a novel about music and race, love and loyalty, and marks the arrival of an extraordinarily "gifted storyteller" (Toronto Star).

A Novel

Half-Blood Blues

In this lecture, author Esi Edugyan explores the concept of home through her own experiences.

Observations on Home

Dreaming of Elsewhere

An insightful exploration and moving meditation on identity, art, and belonging from one of the most celebrated writers of the last decade. What happens when we begin to consider stories at the margins, when we grant them centrality? How does that complicate our certainties about who we are, as individuals, as nations, as human beings? Through the lens of visual art, literature, film, and the author’s lived experience, Out of the Sun examines Black histories in art, offering new perspectives to challenge us. In this groundbreaking, reflective, and erudite book, two-time Scotiabank Giller Prize winner and internationally bestselling author Esi Edugyan illuminates myriad varieties of Black experience in global culture and history. Edugyan combines storytelling with analyses of contemporary events and her own personal story in this dazzling first major work of non-fiction.

On Race and Storytelling

Out of the Sun

Winner of the 2018 Scotiabank Giller Prize A dazzling, original novel of slavery and freedom, from the author of the international bestseller Half-Blood Blues When two English brothers arrive at a Barbados sugar plantation, they bring with them a darkness beyond what the slaves have already known. Washington Black – an eleven year-old field slave – is horrified to find himself chosen to live in the quarters of one of these men. But the man is not as Washington expects him to be. His new master is the eccentric Christopher Wilde – naturalist, explorer, inventor and abolitionist – whose obsession to perfect a winged flying machine disturbs all who know him. Washington is initiated into a world of wonder: a world where the night sea is set alight with fields of jellyfish, where a simple cloth canopy can propel a man across the sky, where even a boy born in chains may embrace a life of dignity and meaning – and where two people, separated by an impossible divide, can begin to see each other as human. But when a man is killed one fateful night, Washington is left to the mercy of his new masters. Christopher Wilde must choose between family ties and young Washington's life. What follows is a flight along the eastern coast of America, as the men attempt to elude the bounty that has been placed on Washington's head. Their journey opens them up to the extraordinary: to a dark encounter with a necropsicist, a scholar of the flesh; to a voyage aboard a vessel captained by a hunter of a different kind; to a glimpse through an unexpected portal into the Underground Railroad. This is a novel of fraught bonds and betrayal. What brings Wilde and Washington together ultimately tears them apart, leaving Washington to seek his true self in a world that denies his very existence. From the blistering cane fields of Barbados to the icy plains of the Canadian Arctic, from the mud-drowned streets of London to the eerie deserts of Morocco, Washington Black teems with all the strangeness of life. This inventive, electrifying novel asks, What is Freedom? And can a life salvaged from the ashes ever be made whole?

History is a construction. What happens when we bring stories consigned to the margins up to the light? How does that complicate our certainties about who we are, as individuals, as nations, as human beings? As in her fiction, the essays in Out of the Sun demonstrate Esi Edugyan's commitment to seeking out the stories of Black lives that history has failed to record. Written with the death of George Floyd and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in the background, in five wide-ranging essays Edugyan reflects on her own identity and experiences as the daughter of Ghanaian immigrants. She delves into the history of Western Art and the truths about Black lives that it fails to reveal, and the ways contemporary Black artists are reclaiming and reimagining those lives. She explores and celebrates the legacy of Afrofuturism, the complex and problematic practice of racial passing, the place of ghosts and haunting in the imagination, and the fascinating relationship between Africa and Asia dating back to the 6th Century. With calm, piercing intelligence, and a refusal to think on anyone's terms but her own, Edugyan asks difficult questions about how we reckon with the past and imagine the future, and invites the reader to think alongside her in working out what the answers to these may be.

Essays at the Crossroads of Race

Out of The Sun

Le avventure di Washington Black

Ada Arduini

George Washington Black, detto Wash, è uno schiavo di undici anni in una piantagione di canna da zucchero delle Barbados. Wash è terrorizzato dalla scelta del suo padrone di cederlo al fratello come servitore. Con sua sorpresa, tuttavia, l’eccentrico Christopher Wilde risulta essere un naturalista, un esploratore, un inventore e, soprattutto, un abolizionista. Presto Wash viene introdotto in un mondo di bizzarre invenzioni, in cui una macchina volante può trasportare un uomo attraverso il cielo, dove un ragazzo nato in catene può abbracciare una vita di dignità e libertà e dove due persone, separate da classi sociali distinte, possono vedersi solo come esseri umani. Ma quando un uomo viene ucciso e viene messa una taglia sulla testa di Wash, Christopher e Wash devono abbandonare tutto. Quello che segue è il loro volo lungo la costa orientale dell’America e, infine, verso un remoto avamposto nell’Artico. Presto la fuga spingerà Wash ancora più lontano, alla ricerca del suo vero sé. Dai campi di canna da zucchero dei Caraibi al lontano Nord, dai primi acquari di Londra agli inquietanti deserti del Marocco, La storia di Washington Black racconta una faccenda di tradimento, amore e redenzione, ponendo una domanda universale: qual è la vera libertà?

«Una storia emozionante, fatta di verità e tradimenti». Times «Questo suono è una leggenda brilla per introspezione e accuratezza della ricostruzione storica... riesce a rievocare, in modo straordinario, lo spirito del tempo: lo scintillio del jazz, la provocazione che incarnano i suoi protagonisti, lo slang dell’epoca». Independent

Questo suono è una leggenda

On Art, Race and the Future

Haunting and atmospheric, this debut novel portrays the heartbreak, hardship and moments of surprising grace in the life of a man struggling to realize his destiny. A young man of astonishing promise when he emigrated from Ghana in 1955, Samuel Tyne was determined to accomplish great things. Fifteen long years later, he’s an insignificant government employee who hates his job when he unexpectedly inherits his uncle’s crumbling mansion in Aster, Alberta. Despite his wife’s resistance and the sullen complaints of his thirteen-year-old twin daughters, Samuel quits his job and moves his family to the town. For here, he believes, is that fabled second chance, and he is determined not to fail again. At first, Aster seems perfect — to Samuel, the formerly all-black town represents the return to a communal, idyllic way of life. But he soon discovers the town’s problems: a history of in-fighting, a strict town council and a series of mysterious fires that put all the townsfolk on edge. When his daughters cease speaking and refuse to explain their increasingly strange behaviour, Samuel turns more and more to the refuge of his electronics shop. As his ambitions intensify, the life he has struggled so hard to improve begins to disintegrate around him, and a dark current of menace in the town is turned upon the Tyne family.

The Second Life of Samuel Tyne

Samuel Tyne always believed he was destined for greatness. Emigrating to Canada from Ghana in the 1960'S was the first step on this path, but fifteen years later his grand plans have stalled. He now has a wife Maud, twin thirteen year old daughters Chloe and Yvette, and a mind-numbing job. But then he is thrown a life line. His uncle Jacob dies, leaving him a grand but crumbling house in the town of Aster, and Samuel persuades his reluctant family to seize this chance for a new beginning. At first Aster seems perfect, but soon the town's faultlines are revealed, and the family begins to feel the strain. Samuel opens an electrical shop, but the business falters as he falls victim to his own outlandish ambitions, trying to build computers when all the townspeople want is lightbulbs and radios. His wife is unhappy, and as for his daughters - they are drifting into a private world of two, their behaviour becoming ever more sinister and disturbing to everyone around them. When their school friend Ama comes to stay and nearly drowns in mysterious circumstances, and then a series of fires around the town go unexplained, Samuel and Maud must face up to the secrets within their own family, secrets that threaten to completely tear apart the life they have built.

Esi Edugyan

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