Days by Moonlight
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
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 this is 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 between dog and wolf. And it asks that perpetual question: how do we know the things we know are real, and what is real anyway?
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Days by Moonlight is a waking dream of a novel that teeters between fiction and poetry. Reeling from multiple losses, botanist Alfred Homer embarks on a literary quest with a professor who’s in search of a long-lost poet. While the journey is literal, it’s also a trek through grief’s layers—and a look at Canada’s fragmented identity. As his characters pass through small towns in a stylized Ontario, author André Alexis introduces curious local rituals anchored in race and culture—like places where black people observe distinct rules around speaking, or where sexuality is a museum curiosity. We were swept up in this languid philosophical journey.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Alexis follows up his Scotiabank Giller Prize winning Fifteen Dogs with this darkly funny exploration of mourning and Canadian identity, containing a touch of the surreal. Amateur botanist Alfie Homer is grieving the accidental death of his parents and a breakup from his girlfriend when family friend Professor Bruno invites him to be his driver and transcriber on a research trip. Professor Bruno is seeking information for scholarly work on poet John Skennen, who disappeared 20 years earlier and is presumed dead. They talk with Skennen's relatives, high school classmates, and former lovers, hearing strange, complex stories of riddles, witches, and possible sightings of Skennen while Alfie catalogues increasingly bizarre plants. Their journey invokes biting satire as they visit small Ontario towns where black inhabitants communicate only through sign language, residents celebrate heritage by burning historically accurate homes, and an attempt to honor indigenous peoples in a parade flounders over white people's attempts to be politically correct. After visiting the unsettling Museum of Canadian Sexuality, the professor and Alfie end up in a town with a mystical reputation and have strange experiences that spark fierce battles between the two of them about belief and the inexplicable. This imaginative travelogue will amuse readers even as it raises weightier issues.
