Industry Reviews
Washington Black is nothing short of a masterpiece. Esi Edugyan has a rare talent for turning over little known stones of history and giving her reader a new lens on the world, a new way of understanding subject matter we arrogantly think we know everything about. This book is an epic adventure and a heartfelt tale about love and morality and their many contradictions. I loved it. -- Attica Locke
Washington Black is a profoundly humane story about false idols, the fickleness of fortune and whether a slave, once freed, can ever truly be free. * The Times *
Edugyan displays as much ingenuity and resourcefulness as her main characters ... A thoughtful, boldly imagined book that broadens inventive possibilities for the antebellum novel * starred Kirkus review *
Praise for Half-Blood Blues
'Edugyan never stumbles with her storytelling, not over one sentence * Independent *
Lyrical and genuinely exciting; a captivating book that races along with verve and panache. * Daily Express *
Edugyan really can write ... redemptive * Guardian *
Ingenious... * Daily Telegraph *
Superbly atmospheric... [a] brilliant, fast-moving novel. * The Times *
Assured, vivid and persuasive... Impressively evocative of period and place * Time Out *
You'll relish how Edugyan's consistent, arresting musicality, at both the sentence and structural levels, develops its own accurate truth about experience... literary genius * Dallas News *
Mesmerising... A remarkable novel * Morning Star *
what stands out most is its cadenced narration and slangy dialogue, as conversations, both spoken and unspoken, snap, sizzle, and slide off the page. * Publisher's Weekly *
shines with knowledge, emotional insight, and historical revisionism, yet it never becomes overburdened by its research. * Canberra Times *
a triumph... punchy and atmospheric. * Sunday Times *
Praise for Half-Blood Blues
'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
Sublime... * Booklist *
Conversations, both spoken and unspoken, snap, sizzle, and slide off the page * Publishers' Weekly *
Gripping... * Irish Times *
A pacey yet thoughtful exploration of freedom, and our moral compulsion to act * Spectator *
Nimble storytelling . * International Herald Tribune *
An extraordinary, picturesque tale... A richly entertaining read * BBC History *
Magnificent and strikingly visual prose * Financial Times *
The beauty here lies in Edugyan's language, which is precise, vivid, always concerned with word craft and captivating for it... Edugyan's fiction always stays strong, beautiful and beguiling * The Observer *
Excellent ... Edugyan can write beautifully ... In places, the novel is devastating, precisely because she is never gratuitous or sentimental ... In a story that is escapist, as well as poignant and political, Edugyan enjoys taking her readers where they are least expecting to go. * Irish Independent *
An enthralling meditation on the weight of freedom, wrapped in a rousing adventure story stretching to the ends of the earth... beautiful and affecting * Boston Globe *
A powerful, twisting work of historical fiction ... Edugyan is a marvelous writer * Seattle Times *
elegant and nuanced * Christian Science Monitor *
Washington Black's triumph is to make us think searchingly about slavery and racism, while entertaining us in the style of Jules Verne or Dickens... [An] epic, powerfully imaginerd continent-spanning tale * Times Literary Supplement *
[A] masterful novel * The Economist *
A full-pelt adventure story featuring hot-air balloon crashes, blizzards in the Arctic, scientific discovery, knife fights in dark alleys, bounty hunters and forbidden romance ... Washington Black is entertaining, gripping and actually readable * Sunday Times *
A thoughtful, profound epic that feels destined to become a future classic ... It's a masterpiece which is full of surprises, and is that rare book that should appeal to every kind of reader. * Guardian *
The Canadian novelist Esi Edugyan wove slavery and the science of fight into the boisterously imaginative caper of Washington Black * The Telegraph *
