Code Noir

De: Canisia Lubrin

Narrado por: Canisia Lubrin, Marsha Regis, K. C. Collins, Mia Golden

2024 Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, Short-listed

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

Reseñas de la Crítica

FINALIST FOR THE 2024 ATWOOD GIBSON WRITERS' TRUST FICTION PRIZE

FINALIST FOR THE 2024 GOVERNOR GENERAL'S LITERARY AWARD FOR FICTION

"A collection that is profound and inveterately inventive, Code Noir expands what is possible in the realm of narrative. With purposeful defiance, Lubrin writes stories that cut effortlessly across eras and continents with the Black diaspora, within and against a history of institutionalized violence and oppression. She pushes against the laws governing what words can and can’t do, emerging finally with a sharp-edged language that is entirely sui generis. Lubrin’s work is conceptual genius, allusive across a wide swath of culture, from jazz to literature to art. Code Noir is a singular achievement.”—2024 Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize jury (Saeed Teebi, Joan Thomas, and Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike)

“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