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Code Noir  By  cover art

Code Noir

By: Canisia Lubrin
Narrated by: Canisia Lubrin, Marsha Regis, K. C. Collins, Mia Golden
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Publisher's summary

Here is groundbreaking, dazzling debut fiction from one of Canada's most exciting and admired writers.

Canisia Lubrin's debut fiction is that rare work of art—a brilliant, startlingly original book that combines immense literary and political force. Its structure is deceptively simple: it departs from the infamous real-life “Code Noir,” a set of historical decrees originally passed in 1685 by King Louis XIV of France defining the conditions of slavery in the French colonial empire. The original Code had fifty-nine articles; Code Noir has fifty-nine linked fictions—vivid, unforgettable, multi-layered fragments filled with globe-wise characters who desire to live beyond the ruins of the past.

Ranging in style from contemporary realism to dystopia, from futuristic fantasy to historical fiction, this inventive, shape-shifting braid of stories exists far beyond the enclosures of official decrees. This is a timely, daring, virtuosic book by a young literary star.

©2023 Canisia Lubrin (P)2023 Knopf Canada

Critic reviews

“Brilliant, challenging, and ecstatic. . . . Code Noir refracts hundreds of years of history into a lively book of fictions. . . . The end result is exactly right, obscuring and countering, rewriting and reweaving, the colonial ordering of the world. . . . [A] dazzling achievement.” —The Globe and Mail

“Visceral, disruptive. . . . Astonishing. . . . Canisia Lubrin has turned her attention to fiction in her striking new work, Code Noir . . . play[ing] with form, time, and polyvocality . . . grounded in the making and unmaking of historical narratives of Black diasporic experience.” Winnipeg Free Press

“An interconnected allegory. . . . Lubrin’s iconoclastic flights subvert hierarchies and cover continents and aeons of pain. . . . Torkwase Dyson’s drawings depict these allegories . . . [adding] a fuller picture to Lubrin’s already fulsome text.” The Miramichi Reader (starred review)

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