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At the Full and Change of the Moon
320 pages
A lush, polyphonic epic that traces the haunting echoes of ancestry and trauma across centuries and continents.
What it feels like
Reading this novel feels like being swept into a vast, oceanic current of memory and myth. It is a deeply atmospheric, meandering experience that prioritizes the lyrical rhythm of its sentences over a propulsive plot. The prose is lush, elegiac, and fiercely poetic, demanding that you slow down and let the chorus of voices wash over you. There is a profound sorrow woven into the text, a haunting weight of generational trauma and diasporic longing, yet it is equally illuminated by fierce resilience and passion. It is a book for readers who want to be submerged in language, who appreciate non-linear, multi-generational epics where history feels like a living, breathing ghost in the room.
- Mood
- haunting
- mythic
- oceanic
- sorrowful
- Tone
- elegiac
- lyrical
- fierce
- mournful
- Pace
- meandering
- Themes
- generational trauma · diasporic longing · persistence of memory · weight of ancestry · survival and resistance
- The writing
- Lush, poetic, and rhythmically complex, reading more like an extended, polyphonic prose poem than traditional narrative.
- The arc
- Moves from the devastating rupture of historical trauma into a sprawling, fragmented search for connection and survival across generations.
- Who it's for
- Readers who savor dense, lyrical prose and non-linear, multi-generational epics that prioritize emotional resonance over traditional plot.
Content notes
- slavery
- mass suicide
- generational trauma
- racism
- grief
About the book
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)
Description from Open Library.
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