In 1824, on the island of Trinidad, Marie Ursule, queen of a secret society of militant slaves, plots a mass suicide—a quiet, passionate act of revolt. But she cannot bring herself to kill her small daughter, Bola, whom she smuggles away in the early dawn light. As Bola's children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren spill out across the world to America, Canada and Europe, they find their lives both haunted and vindicated by the dreams and passions of their defiant ancestor. The interconnected stories of six generations of Marie Ursule's descendants form a lush, beguiling and beautifully told history of dispossession, and bring this Governor General's Award-winning writer into the front rank of the world's novelists.

Dionne Brand is internationally known for her poetry, fiction, and essays. She has received many awards, notably the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, the Trillium Award (Land to Light On), 1997), the Pat Lowther Award (Thirsty, 2005), the City of Toronto Book Award (What We All Long For, 2006), and the Harbourfront Festival Award (2006), given in recognition of her substantial contribution to literature. She is a professor in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph.

Leslie C. Sanders is a professor at York University, where she teaches African American and Black Canadian literature. She is the author of The Development of Black Theatre in America, the editor of two volumes of Langston Hughes’s performance works, and a general editor of the Collected Works of Langston Hughes. She has written essays on African American and Black Canadian literature.

Dionne Brand's profile page

• Winner, Harbourfront Festival Prize

"One of the essential works of our times. . . . Rich, elegiac . . . nothing short of brilliant." —The Globe and Mail

"Sensuous . . . wildly lyrical . . . wonderful. . . . Extremely impressive in the range of its characters and situations. . . . It is an unforgettable world [that] pierces the imagination." —The Toronto Star

"Rich and vibrant. . . . Dionne Brand continues to wrestle with her restless poetics in an effort to forge a language bold enough for the big ideas she likes to cram into her fiction . . . Sensuous, sometimes hallucinatory prose. . . . Brand's is a voice both brave and beautiful." —NOW
"Extraordinary. . . . Dionne Brand . . . exults in the power of language and deploys it to lure us from harsh reality to metaphysical heights. . . . The prose, so close to poetry, [is] almost musical." —National Post
"Tough, unflinching . . . hauntingly beautiful. The novel creates a rich world." —Philip Marchand, the Toronto Star
"Brand draws us into a fierce, incendiary plantation world, a lush, dense revolutionary zone . . . through the sheer force of her imagination wills an obscured history back to life." —The Montreal Gazette

"A brilliant work. Like all her writing, Brand’s work here is dense, beautiful and sure, but what makes this work even bigger again is her evocation of an intricately connected past and present." —Georgia Straight

"At the Full and Change of the Moon is simply a beautiful, frightening and engaging book. . . . [A] powerful novel." —Books in Canada