At the Full and Change of the Moon

Dionne Brand

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Written with lyrical fire in a chorus of vividly rendered voices, Dionne Brand's second novel is an epic of the African diaspora across the globe. It begins in 1824 on Trinidad, where Marie-Ursule, queen of a secret slave society called the Sans Peur Regiment, plots a mass suicide. 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. "[Brand has] a lush and exuberant style that may put some readers in mind of Toni Morrison or Edwidge Danticat." -- William Ferguson, The New York Times Book Review; "A delicately structured, beautifully written novel infused with rare emotional clarity." -Julie Wheelwright, The Independent (London); "Rich, elegiac, almost biblical in its rhythms . . . One of the essential works of our times." -- The Globe & Mail (Toronto)
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, who lives alone in the family home, wandering among the dead and waiting for the generations of her ancestors to join her.

Book Details

Publisher: Grove Press
Publish Date: Aug 14th, 2000
Pages: 320
Language: English
Edition: undefined - undefined
Dimensions: 8.27in - 5.57in - 0.95in - 0.79lb
EAN: 9780802137234
Categories: • Literary• Sagas

Praise for this book

Praise for Dionne Brand:

"[Brand has] a lush and exuberant style that may put some readers in mind of Toni Morrison or Edwidge Danticat." -The New York Times Book Review

"Joining such acclaimed Caribbean writers as Paule Marshall, Rosa Guy, Jamaica Kincaid and Maryse Conde is a new group of outstanding talents like Edwidge Danticat and Patrick Chamoiseau. One must add to that list Dionne Brand. At the Full and Change of the Moon, her second novel, is a hypnotically compelling, magical set of tales...The stories, fascinating, sad and sometimes horrific, are told in a densely rhythmic and haunting style that is also full of heartbreak and longing for things beyond the characters' grasp. . . . [an] unsettling and beautifully written novel." --Paula L. Woods, Los Angeles Times

"Luminously written. . .haunting." --Emerge (Recommended Reading)

"It is hard to describe, but there is a grave radiance inside this book. Step into its light." --Carole Maso

"[An] ambitious and uncompromising meditation on the meaning of freedom and the power of memory." --The Boston Book Review

"The language in these interlocking tales is as rhythmic as waves in the sea, sometimes incantory: dreamlike or nightmarish...Ghosts may fill some of the rooms and wander along the shore, but what happens is all in the mind-mystical and mystifying, true and shadowed. Sometimes evocation is simply exquisite, as the depiction of the prostitute Maya sitting in her window in Amsterdam; other times, as the second Bola inhabits the old house in Trinidad with the ghost of her grandmother, it is terrifying. Fabulous in the deepest sense of the word." --Booklist

"Impassioned, lyrical...a tactile history of brutal, beautiful images that flutter before the eye and ache against the skin." --Alberto Mobilio, The Village Voice Literary Supplement's "Writers on the Verge"

"A distinguished, visionary work, grounded in the language and legacy of [Brand's] native Trinidad. Intricately structured and lyrically narrated...Brand seamlessly fuses individual and collective identities in a work of poetic achievement." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"A powerful family saga, filled with passion and anguish . . . Brand renders [these] lives in rich, almost lyrical language, offering up a world filled with unique characters." --Library Journal (starred review)

"[Dionne Brand] has a way of kneading language into shape, creating a prose-style which is effortlessly musical and wholly original." --The Times (London)

"Dionne Brand's luscious new novel features an African-American Eve whose children leave Trinidad to travel all over the world, their lives weaving around one another in brilliant strands. . . . A delicately structured, beautifully written novel infused with rare emotional clarity." --The Independent (London)

"Rich, elegiac, almost biblical in its rhythms . . . One of the essential works of our times . . . The authority with which Brand sinks into these lives, assuming their very different sensibilities, is astonishing." --Joan Thomas, The Globe & Mail (Toronto)

"Sensuous ...wildly lyrical...wonderful...[It] pierces the imagination." --The Toronto Star

"In its uses of imagistic language, the novel is reminisce

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