Now available in paperback, an insightful exploration and moving meditation on identity, art, and belonging from one of the most celebrated writers of the last decade.
What happens when we begin to consider stories at the margins, when we grant them centrality? How does that complicate our certainties about who we are, as individuals, as nations, as human beings? Through the lens of visual art, literature, film, and the author’s lived experience, Out of the Sun examines Black histories in art, offering new perspectives to challenge us.
In this groundbreaking, reflective, and erudite book, two-time Scotiabank Giller Prize winner and internationally bestselling author Esi Edugyan illuminates myriad varieties of Black experience in global culture and history. Edugyan combines storytelling with analyses of contemporary events and her own personal story in this dazzling first major work of non-fiction.

A graduate of Johns Hopkins University and the University of Victoria, ESI EDUGYAN was raised in Calgary, Alberta. She is the award-winning and internationally bestselling author of Washington Black, which was a finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Man Booker Award and won the Scotiabank Giller Prize; Half-Blood Blues, which was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award and the Man Booker Prize and won the Scotiabank Giller Prize; and The Second Life of Samuel Tyne. She is also the author of Dreaming of Elsewhere, which is part of the Kreisel Memorial Lecture Series. She has held fellowships in the U.S., Scotland, Iceland, Germany, Hungary, Finland, Spain, and Belgium. She lives in Victoria, British Columbia.

Esi Edugyan's profile page

• Winner, Victoria Butler Book Prize

Distinguished by its erudite yet unpretentious prose and probing viewpoints, this is an essential reckoning with how history is made.

Publishers Weekly, STARRED REVIEW

To examine Blackness is to find that it is a mirage, a story that is always being written and rewritten at the same time. … Facts will collide with fantasies, the past with the present. If Edugyan is sometimes chasing shadows across continents only to find that the destination eludes her, the journey, at least, proves worthwhile.

Alberta Views

Out of the Sun is an artful patchwork quilt, constructed from existing scholarship in a number of fields and other sources. … Each section of the book represents another moment in time, brimming with historical personages.

Event Magazine