Description
WINNER OF THE 2019 SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE
An internationally bestselling debut novel: an energetically told, funny and moving book about how strangers become family. Reproduction tells a crooked love story which takes strange, winding paths shaped by community, family and fleeting interactions that leave an inedible imprint. Felicia, a nineteen-year-old West Indian student, and Edgar, an impetuous heir of a wealthy German family, meet when their ailing mothers are assigned the same hospital room.
An odd-couple relationship blooms between Edgar and Felicia, ripe with miscommunications and reprisals for perceived and real offences that have some unexpected results. Fast-forward, their son Armistice 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 inopportune moment, the book’s exhilarating final act is set in the motion and Reproduction is revealed.
Bert –
This is a challenging read, not from a plot point of view, but because of the style of writing which gradually grows more complicated through the book. All for good reason, it illustrates the point it’s trying to make, and there’s one technique of spelling Edgar’s name wrong that has a heart-breaking pay-off.