by Esi Edugyan
First published 2012
Sid Griffiths sits in a Berlin screening room in 1952, watching a documentary about his former bandmate Hieronymus Falk. The young black trumpet player vanished thirteen years earlier when the Nazis arrested him at a Paris café. Falk had been the star of their jazz group, the Hot Time Swingers, until the regime banned them from performing in 1939. Now Falk has become a legend, and Louis Armstrong himself had called the missing musician a genius. When Sid and fellow band member Chip Jones attend the film's premiere, questions arise about what really happened that night in Paris. The documentary forces Sid to relive the friendships and betrayals that led to Falk's capture and imprisonment in Sachsenhausen. As the two aging musicians embark on an unexpected journey, Sid must reckon with his own complicity in his friend's fate. The story moves between the underground jazz clubs of prewar Berlin and the intimate salons of Paris, revealing a hidden world where music and survival intersected under Nazi rule.
Genres: historical-fiction, 20th-century, music, african-american-historical-fiction
Vibes: atmospheric, emotional, thought-provoking
Tropes: friends-to-lovers, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Berlin, Paris, Sachsenhausen
Period: 1939, 1952
431 pages · Library Binding · Center Point Pub
Content warnings: racism, war