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A Minor Chorus

A Novel

Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
*WINNER OF THE 2023 BC AND YUKON ETHEL WILSON PRIZE*
*LONGLISTED FOR THE 2022 SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE*
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
An urgent first novel about breaching the prisons we live inside from one of Canada’s most daring literary talents.

An unnamed narrator abandons his unfinished thesis and returns to northern Alberta in search of what eludes him: the shape of the novel he yearns to write, an autobiography of his rural hometown, the answers to existential questions about family, love, and happiness.
What ensues is a series of conversations, connections, and disconnections that reveals the texture of life in a town literature has left unexplored, where the friction between possibility and constraint provides an insistent background score.
Whether he’s meeting with an auntie distraught over the imprisonment of her grandson, engaging in rez gossip with his cousin at a pow wow, or lingering in bed with a married man after a hotel room hookup, the narrator makes space for those in his orbit to divulge their private joys and miseries, testing the theory that storytelling can make us feel less lonely.
Populated by characters as alive and vast as the boreal forest, and culminating in a breathtaking crescendo, A Minor Chorus is a novel about how deeply entangled the sayable and unsayable can become—and about how ordinary life, when pressed, can produce hauntingly beautiful music.
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  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from September 12, 2022
      Memoirist Belcourt (A History of My Brief Body) delivers an achingly gorgeous debut novel of Indigenous survival. The unnamed narrator, a 24-year-old queer Cree graduate student living in Edmonton, Alberta, has stalled on his dissertation in critical theory. He decides to leave the program and return home to northern Alberta to write a novel. For research, he interviews locals, including a great-aunt whose grandson has been arrested and a newspaper editor who never came out as gay after losing his first love to suicide. Even the narrator’s depiction of a hookup with a visiting white man veers into a precise, insightful excavating of trauma. A trip to the nearby residential school sparks an unpleasant encounter with an entitled white woman before the narrator returns to Edmonton for one last interview. Belcourt weaves in a steady stream of references to work by Judith Butler, Roland Barthes, and Maggie Nelson without losing narrative momentum, and he delivers incendiary reflections on the costs, scars, and power of history and community. This is a breathtaking and hypnotic achievement.

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Jesse Nobess gives a contemplative performance of this genre-defying debut novel from poet Billy-Ray Belcourt. The unnamed narrator is a queer Cree PhD student, who, fed up with the confines of academia, abandons his dissertation to return to his rural hometown to write a novel. Nobess's deliberate narration often sounds as if he's working something out as he speaks. It's fitting because that's exactly what the narrator is doing--working through ideas, feelings, and theories as he talks with old friends, neighbors, and family. Much of the novel sounds like an extended poem--and Nobess highlights the beauty of the words, letting the prose take center stage. Creative, moving, inventive, and powerful, this audiobook is a must-listen. L.S. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

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  • English

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