Days by Moonlight

by André Alexis

Overview

Gulliver’s Travels meets The Underground Railroad: a road trip through the countryside – and the psyche – by the author of Fifteen Dogs.

Botanist Alfred Homer, ever hopeful and constantly surprised, is invited on a road trip by his parents’ friend, Professor Morgan Bruno, who wants company as he tries to unearth the story of the mysterious poet John Skennen. But this is no ordinary road trip. Alfred and the Professor encounter towns where Black residents speak only in sign language and towns that hold Indigenous Parades; it is a land of house burnings, werewolves, and witches.

Complete with Alfred’s drawings of plants both real and implausible, Days by Moonlight is a Dantesque journey taken during the “hour of the wolf,” that time of day when the sun is setting and the traveller can’t tell the difference between dog and wolf. And it asks that perpetual question: how do we know the things we know are real, and what is real anyway?

“A mash-up that is part fabulism, part faux biography, and part satire, Days by Moonlight conveys the experience of grief, managing to transform its inarticulable and symbolic weight into a finely wrought literary work.” —Quill and Quire

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781552453797
Publisher:	Coach House Books
Publication date:	04/02/2019
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

André Alexis was born in Trinidad and grew up in Canada. He is the author of the Quincunx, comprised of five novels: Fifteen Dogs, winner of the Giller Prize, CBC Canada Reads, and the Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize; Days by Moonlight, winner of the Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize; Pastoral; The Hidden Keys; and Ring. His debut novel, Childhood, won the Books in Canada First Novel and the Trillium Book Award, and was shortlisted for the Giller Prize and the Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. His other books include Asylum, The Night Piece, Despair and Other Stories of Ottawa, and most recently Other Worlds, longlisted for the Toronto Book Award. He is the recipient of a Windham Campbell Prize. He lives in Toronto.

André Alexis was born in Trinidad and grew up in Canada. In 2017, he was awarded the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for fiction. His novel Fifteen Dogs won the 2015 Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. His debut novel, Childhood, won the Books in Canada First Novel Award, the Trillium Book Award, and was shortlisted for the Giller Prize and the Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. His other books include The Hidden Keys, Pastoral (nominated for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize), Asylum, Beauty and Sadness, Ingrid & the Wolf, Despair and Other Stories of Ottawa and Lambton, Kent and Other Vistas: A Play.

Editorial Reviews

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

From the Publisher

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.

Kirkus Reviews