From the Publisher
This imaginative travelogue will amuse readers even as it raises weightier issues.” — Publishers Weekly
“André Alexis’s fiction pulls off the nearly-impossible: it hearkens back to seemingly archaic modes of storytelling, then brings them seamlessly into the modern day, serving as a reminder of why these forms has power in the first place.” — Tobias Carroll, LitHub, “19 Books You Should Read This April: Recommended Reading from Lit Hub Staff and Contributors”
“What’s so enjoyable about Days by Moonlight is that it turns the act of reading into traveling, and traveling into a constant swaying between wonder and bewilderment.” — Full Stop
"With the dream-like touch of a magical realist, Alexis carries us away on a profound and hilarious drive through small-town Ontario as it’s never been seen before in search of a mysterious poet named Skennen. It’s a journey where the spiritual meets the commonplace and the bizarre, the underworld comes up for air when you least expect it, and the Divine patiently watches over all. Days by Moonlight is a funny, moving, and wholly original take on the quest narrative that liberates the imagination with a loud whoop of joy." —2019 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize Jury
Kirkus Reviews
2019-02-18
Alexis' (The Hidden Keys, 2016, etc.) tale of two men's search for a long-missing poet is a surreal adventure through Canada's fraught racial history.
Alfred Homer, a botanist at a private firm in Toronto, is grieving the first anniversary of his parents' deaths in a car accident. Even worse, his partner, Anne, has decided she doesn't want to marry him. As Alfred recovers from the dissolution of three relationships, relief arrives unexpectedly: Professor Morgan Bruno, an eccentric literary scholar and friend of his parents, calls to invite him on a research project. Bruno studies the poet John Skennen, a writer with the "talent of an angel" who mysteriously stopped publishing in the late 1990s. By driving from Toronto to the Ontario town of Feversham and visiting various small towns in between, Bruno hopes to gather details that will help him finish his biography on the lost poet. Alfred figures the trip will be a relaxing vacation. Besides, he's heard tell that oniaten, a rare plant with mysterious qualities, has been sighted on the outskirts of Feversham. The journey turns out to be an uncanny trip through a bizarre alternate-reality version of Canada. In honor of Canada's white pioneers, the town of Nobleton hosts an annual house-burning celebration, during which crowds watch local families struggle to save their homes from the flames. In neighboring Coulson's Hill, an "Indigenous Parade" offers up meager reparations for the harm Canada's First Nations suffered at the hands of those same white pioneers. Meanwhile, the town of Schomberg hosts a black population that speaks almost entirely in sign language—the legacy of a law that banned freed American slaves from speaking aloud within the town's limits. Over the course of Alfred's journey, the book reveals itself to be a critique of Canada's white supremacist underpinnings. "I don't suppose any place reveals itself to you all at once," Alfred reflects at one point. "It comes at you in waves of associative detail." This book feels like a wave of associative detail which Alexis uses to satirize a racial history that is stranger than fiction. As the novel drags on, though, it begins to feel rudderless; the search for Skennen comes to feel like a thin premise on which to hang a string of surrealist gags. By the time Alfred and Bruno approach a mystical fate in Feversham, the reader has lost any investment in them or their journey.
Funny but thin.
