WINNER OF THE 2019 SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE AND CBC'S BEST NOVEL OF THE
YEAR, this best-selling debut novel is an energetically told, funny, and
moving book about how strangers become family.
Reproduction tells a crooked love story in which love takes strange,
winding paths and grows in a context shaped by community, family,
longstanding friendships, and fleeting interactions that leave their
mark on us forever.
Felicia, a nineteen-year-old student from a West Indian family, and
Edgar, the lazy-minded and impetuous heir of a wealthy German family,
meet by chance when their ailing mothers are assigned the same hospital
room. After the death of Felicia's mother and the recovery of Edgar's,
Felicia drops out of high-school and takes a job as caregiver to Edgar's
mother. The odd-couple relationship between Edgar and Felicia, ripe with
miscommunications, misunderstandings, and reprisals for perceived and
real offenses, has some unexpected results.
Years later, Felicia's son Armistice--"Army" for short--is a teenager
fixated on a variety of get-rich-quick schemes that are as comic as they
are indicative of the immigrant son's fear of falling through the
cracks. When Edgar re-enters Felicia's life at a typically (for him)
inopportune moment, the book's exhilarating final act is set in the
motion and the full import of its title is revealed.
"This gorgeous novel vibrates with life...Stylistically inventive and
narratively compelling, Reproduction is stunning."--Aminatta Forna,
author of The Memory of Love
A JUNE 2020 INDIE NEXT GREAT READ
