Featured Author Event: Esi Edugyan (Brooklyn)
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Come out on Monday, June 17, to Books Are Magic in Brooklyn to see New York Times bestselling author Esi Edugyan discuss her latest book, WASHINGTON BLACK, published by Knopf/Vintage. This free, one-hour event begins at 7:30 p.m., and Edugyan will be signing copies of her book after her talk.
In what Barack Obama named as one of his favorite books of 2018, eleven-year-old George Washington Black—or Wash—a field slave on a Barbados sugar plantation, is initially terrified when he is chosen as the manservant of his master’s brother. To his surprise, however, the eccentric Christopher Wilde turns out to be a naturalist, explorer, inventor, and abolitionist. Soon Wash is initiated into a world where a flying machine can carry 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 and a bounty is placed on Wash’s head, they must abandon everything and flee together. Over the course of their travels, what brings Wash and Christopher together will tear them apart, propelling Wash ever farther across the globe in search of his true self. Spanning the Caribbean to the frozen Far North, London to Morocco, WASHINGTON BLACK, winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize, is a story of self-invention and betrayal, of love and redemption, a world destroyed and made whole again.
Esi Edugyan is also the author of the novels The Second Life of Samuel Tyne and Half-Blood Blues, which won the Scotiabank Giller Prize and was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize, the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Orange Prize. She lives in Victoria, British Columbia.