A superbly atmospheric prologue kick-starts a thrilling story about truth and betrayal... [a] brilliant, fast-moving novel. -- Kate Saunders * Times *
Assured, vivid and persuasive... Impressively evocative of period and place, and an effortlessly involving and dramatically unusual second novel. -- Sharon O'Connell * Time Out *
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. -- Susan Hill * Man Booker Prize judge *
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 -- Bernadine Evaristo * Guardian *
Mesmerising... Edugyan has a perfect ear for conversations and the confusions of human love and jealousy... moving... A remarkable novel. * Morning Star *
Ingenious... -- Anthony Cummins * 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. -- Arifa Akbar * Independent *
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. -- Edmund Gordon * Sunday Times *
Edugyan has mastered the darting, dozens-infused black male jazz voice so well that you'll not pause considering whether Griffiths' or Jones' Baltimorean aphorisms or slang terms are accurate. Instead, you'll relish how Edugyan's consistent, arresting musicality, at both the sentence and structural levels, develops its own accurate truth about experience. Like Armstrong's famous cadenza opening his 1928 recording of West End Blues, Edugyan's Half-Blood Blues is her royal fanfare, a rising flare announcing her literary genius. -- Walton Muyumba * Dallas News *
Edugyan tells this incredibly rich story of music, politics, and personal betrayal both subtly and dramatically, unveiling the mystery of what happened to Falk as she exposes the tensions between the band members and the secret that has been gnawing at one of them for half a century... Edugyan's novel mixes palpable period atmosphere with an interpersonal drama of great emotional depth. That narrow moment in time when the freewheeling decadence of Weimar Germany gave way to jackbooted tyranny has been the subject of much fine fiction, but Edugyan is the first to overlay it with jazz history. It makes a sublime marriage. -- Bill Ott * Booklist *
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 *
Gripping... -- Mary Feely * Irish Times *
Nimble storytelling ... Casablanca-style melodrama with healthy doses of quotidian banter, admirably capturing the bickering camaraderie of the young musicians. * International Herald Tribune *
Lyrical and genuinely exciting it's a captivating book that races along with verve and panache. -- Emma Lee Potter * Daily Express *
