Days by Moonlight
Gulliver's Travels meets The Underground Railroad: a road trip through the countryside – and the psyche – by the author of Fifteen Dogs.
Botanist Alfred Homer, ever hopeful and constantly surprised, is invited on a road trip by his parents' friend, Professor Morgan Bruno, who wants company as he tries to unearth the story of the mysterious poet John Skennen. But thisis no ordinary road trip. Alfred and the Professor encounter towns where Black residents speak only in sign language and towns that hold Indigenous Parades; it is a land of house burnings, werewolves, and witches.
Complete with Alfred's drawings of plants both real and implausible, Days by Moonlight is a Dantesque journey taken during the "hour of the wolf," that time of day when the sun is setting and the traveller can't tell the difference betweendog and wolf. And it asks that perpetual question: how do we know the things we know are real, and what is real anyway?
André Alexis is the author of Fifteen Dogs, which won the Giller Prize, the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, and Canada Reads. His other books have won or been shortlisted for the Giller Prize, the Books in Canada First Novel Award, the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, the Trillium Book Award, the Commonwealth Prize, and the OCM Books Prize for Caribbean Literature. In 2017, he was awarded theWindham-Campbell Literature Prize for fiction. Alexis lives in Toronto.