At the Full and Change of the Moon Book

From acclaimed and award-winning poet and novelist Dionne Brand comes At the Full and Change of the Moon, a saga of magnificent scope, spanning six generations of Africans in the Americas and beyond. In 1824 on the island of Trinidad, Marie-Ursule, queen of a secret society of militant slaves called the Sans Peur Regiment, plots a mass suicide - a quietly brazen act of revolt. The end of the Sans Peur is also the beginning of a new world, for Marie-Ursule cannot kill her young daughter, Bola - who escapes to live free and bear a dynasty of descendants who spill out across the Caribbean, North America, and Europe. Haunted by a legacy of passion and oppression, the children of Bola pass through two world wars and into the confusion, estrangement, and violence of the late twentieth century. There is Samuel, the soldier who goes to war to defend Mother England and returns with a broken spirit; Cordelia, a woman who has spent her life suppressing the fiery desire that finally catches her, unabated, in her fiftieth year; Priest, the badjohn who leaves the islands for a gangster life ranging from Miami to Brooklyn; and Adrian, who ends up a junkie on the streets of Amsterdam. And still in Trinidad there is the second Bola, a girl who lives alone in the family home, wandering among the dead and waiting for the generations of her ancestors to join her. With lyrical fire and a chorus of voices rendered vividly and beautifully, Dionne Brand's second novel is a work of bold ambition, an epic of the African diaspora that places her in the company of such writers as Toni Morrison, Edwidge Danticat, and Patrick Chamoiseau.Read More