Changes

|title=Half-Blood Blues

|author=Esi Edugyan

|reviewer=Luci Davin

|buy=Yes

|borrow=Yes

|pages=256

|publisher=Serpent's Tail

|isbn=978 1 8466 87754

|website=http://www.esiedugyan.com/

}}

Sid and his friend Chip are revisiting their youth, more than 50 years ago. They were jazz musicians, living and working in Berlin and Paris, until they had to escape Nazi occupied Paris in 1940 to return to Baltimore. Now it is 1992, and all the others they worked with are long since dead. They have just been involved in a documentary about their experiences, and are about to return to Germany (soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall) for a jazz festival in memory of the great Hiero Falk. Hieronymus Falk was a young black German musician with an exceptional musical talent, the star of their band, the Hot-Time Swingers. He was picked up by 'the Boots' as Sid refers to the Germans, in Paris in 1940, and disappeared into a concentration camp, then they heard he was released but died in 1948.

One starting point might be [[Jazz by Gary Giddins and Scott Deveaux]]; Beatrice Colin’s [[The Luminous Life of Lilly Aphrodite by Beatrice Colin|The Luminous Life of Lilly Aphrodite]] offers another fictional take on Berlin.

{{toptentext|list=Man Booker Prize 2011}}

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