It took me no time at all to decide on the E-book for my A-Z CanLit project.  It’s Esi Edugyan’s Half-Blood Blues.  I’ve been wanting to read it since it won the Scotiabank Giller Prize in 2011.  And even more so since it made it to the Top 5 Canada Reads books this year.  After I have read this one, I will have read all 5 contenders for Canada Reads 2014 and will maybe be able to give my opinion on which ones have a chance at becoming the one book that will change our nation.

Here’s some more about Esi Edugyan and her books:

*Esi Edugyan was born in Calgary, Alberta to Ghanaian immigrant parents

*she now lives in Victoria, BC with her husband and daughter

*her first novel, The Second Life of Samuel Tyne, was published in 2004

*she has held fellowships in the US, Scotland, Iceland, Germany, Hungary, Finland, Spain, and Belgium

*Half-Blood Blues is her second book and has received a lot of recognition, including as the 2011 winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize, a finalist for the 2011 Governor General’s Award for Fiction and the Roger Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and shortlisted for the 2011 Man Booker Prize

If you want to see the other awards Half-Blood Blues was in the running for, as well as other information about Esi Edugyan and her writing, you can find it at her site, here.  Here, you can listen to Esi Edugyan’s interview with Shelagh Rogers on CBC radio.