Photo: David Findlay

Nalo Hopkinson has gained universal acclaim as one of the most impressively original authors to emerge in years. Her debut novel, Brown Girl in the Ring, won the Locus Award for Best First Novel, became a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award, and garnered Hopkinson the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Her second novel, Midnight Robber, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.
 

The Salt Roads
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ISBN: 0446533025
Format: Hardcover, 400pp
Pub. Date: November 2003
Publisher: Warner Books, Incorporated

Read and AALBC.com Review

Salt. What Ghandi sought when he sought freedom.
Salt. Of the Earth. When we mean wonderful.
Salt. What Bambara defined when she asked: Are you sure you want to be well?
Salt: Makes grapefruit sweet.
Salt: Cures hams.
Salt: Makes boiled eggs edible
Makes that which is sore well
Is a balm in Gilead.
Is The Salt Roads.
Is a story we all should know.
Is a story we all should know.
Nikki Giovanni, author of Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea: Poems and Not Quite Poems

Jeanne Duval, the ginger-colored entertainer, is descended from African slaves and white sailors. It is twilight, and she argues with her lover Charles Baudelaire in his Paris apartment. Ginger is hot in its roots with a beautiful, lush red flower above. And ginger has a bite as she does' Mer, plantation slave and doctor, has healing hands though her spirit is sickened. She both hungers for and dreads liberation, and longs for the gods to take her home. My wishes can't fly freely. They're rooted to the ground like me, who eats salt.

Thais, a beauty from Alexandria, was sold into slavery and prostitution as a girl. Impelled to seek a glorious revelation, she will travel the long hot roads to Jerusalem. She is dark-skinned, this beauty, and ruddy like copper. No salt-pucker of bitterness in her. Ezili. Born from hope vibrant and hope destroyed. Born of bitter experience. Born of wishing for better. Born. Across centuries and civilizations, award-winning writer Nalo Hopkinson fearlessly explores the relationships women have with their lovers, with each other, with their people, and with the divine. As Jeanne struggles with the volatile Baudelaire, as Mer's dedication is tested by revolution, as Thais crosses paths with the eternal, the author interweaves their experiences and braids vivid acts of brutality with passionate unions of spirit and flesh. The result is a brilliantly imagined tale of sexuality, freedom, and transcendence from one of today's most original authors�a narrative poured forth from deep within the heart and soul.

 

OF DOPPELG�NGERS, DUPPIES, AND DEADS...
"Tan-Tan and Dry Bone": "Duppy Dead Town is where people go when life boof them, when hope left them and happiness cut she eye 'pon them and strut away..."
"Slow Cold Chick": A strange horror hatches out of an empty fridge�and a strange wonder hatches out of an empty life...
"A Habit of Waste": "I was nodding off on the streetcar home from work when I saw the woman�wearing the body I used to have..."
"Ganger: Ball Lightning": Their passion was all that kept them together�until the day that passion wanted a life of its own...
"Greedy Choke Puppy": "Inside my skin I was just one big ball of fire, and Lord, the night air feel nice and cool on the flame! When your youth start to leave you, you have to steal more from somebody who still have plenty..."

"Throughout the Caribbean [there are] stories about people who aren't what they seem. Skin gives these folk their human shape. When the skin comes off, their true selves emerge. And whatever the burden their skin bears, once they remove it, skin folk can fly..."

 

Click to buy this bookMidnight Robber
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Publisher:  Warner Books, Incorporated
Date Published:  March 2000
Format:  Trade Paper

Nalo Hopkinson has gained spectacular acclaim for her unique vision and the way she brings the vibrant traditions of Caribbean literature and lore to modern science fiction. The author of Brown Girl in the Ring, winner of the Locus Award for Best First Novel and finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award, now offers a haunting new tale of innocence and experience...
PRISONER OF NEW HALF WAY TREE

It's Carnival time and the Caribbean-colonized planet of Toussaint is celebrating with music, dance, and pageantry. Masked "Midnight Robbers" waylay revelers with brandished weapons and spellbinding words. But to young Tan-Tan, the Robber Queen is simply a favorite costume to wear at the festival�until her power-corrupted father commits an unforgivable crime. Suddenly, both father and daughter are thrust into the brutal world of New Half Way Tree. Here monstrous creatures from folklore are real, and the humans are violent outcasts in the wilds. Here Tan-Tan must reach into the heart of myth�and become the Robber Queen herself. For only the Robber Queen's legendary powers can save her life...and set her free.

 

Brown Girl in the Ring
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ISBN: 0446674338
Format: Paperback, 250pp
Pub. Date: June 1998
Publisher: Warner Books, Incorporated

Read a review by Sheree R. Thomas

Winner of the Warner Aspect First Novel Contest.
Committed to finding science fiction's voices of the future, Warner Aspect sponsored a search that attracted nearly 1,000 entries from around the world. We are proud to introduce the winner, Nalo Hopkinson: a novelist whose life ranges over a hemisphere, whose experience encompasses enduring traditions of word and story, whose voice authentically reaches to those who are aliens in their own lands, and whose vision touches the essence of history, society, science fiction, and myth.

Brown Girl In The Ring
The rich and the privileged have fled the city, barricaded it behind roadblocks, and left it to crumble. The inner city has had to rediscover old ways-farming, barter, herb lore. But now the monied need a harvest of bodies, and so they prey upon the helpless of the streets. With nowhere to turn, a young woman must open herself to ancient truths, eternal powers, the tragic mystery surrounding her mother and grandmother. She must bargain with gods, and give birth to new legends.

 

Mojo: Conjure Stories
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Edited by Nalo Hopkinson

ISBN: 0446679291
Format: Paperback, 352pp
Pub. Date: March 2003
Publisher: Warner Books, Incorporated

Magic is an ultimate act of presumption. It is tricky, powerful, and often dangerous."

The author of Skin Folk and Brown Girl in the Ring, Nalo Hopkinson is renowned for combining urban literary sensibilities with the rich lore of African-Caribbean cultures. Now, in a powerful anthology of nineteen original stories that explore the perils of personal magic, she brings together some of the most honored voices in modern fantasy and brilliant new talents of African Diaspora fiction. Exploding the myths of zombies and voodoo curses, these narratives range from the ancient rites of the Ibo to the bellies of slave ships, from '20s Jim Crow to '60s Black Power, from unmarked graves at midnight to quiet suburbs at dawn-and prove that where heartache and faith meet, you will find the crossroads for conjuring magic.

Stories included in this collection are:

"Daddy Mention and the Monday Skull," by Andy Duncan
"Rosamojo," by Kiini Ibura Salaam
23 "Lark till Dawn, Princess," by Barth Anderson
"Heartspace," by Steven Barnes
"The Prowl," by Gregory Frost
"Fate," by Jenise Aminoff
"Trial Day," by Tananarive Due
"The Skinned," by Jarla Tangh
"Death's Dreadlocks," by Tobias S. Buckell
"Asuquo, or The Winds of Harmattan," by Nnedima Okorafor
"The Horsemen and the Morning Star," by Barbara Hambly
"She'd Make a Dead Man Crawl," by Gerard Houarner
"Cooking Creole," by A. M. Dellamonica
"White Man's Trick," by Eliot Fintushel
"The Tawny Bitch," by Nisi Shawl
"Bitter Grounds," by Neil Gaiman
"Shining through 24/7," by devorah major
"Notes from a Writer's Book of Cures and Spells," by Marcia Douglas
"How Sukie Cross de Big Wata," by Sheree Renee Thomas

 

Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction
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Nalo Hopkinson (Editor), Kamau Brathwaite

ISBN: 0967968313
Format: Hardcover, 336pp
Pub. Date: October 2000
Publisher: Invisible Cities Press

The lushness of language and the landscape, wild contrasts, and pure storytelling magic abound in this anthology of Caribbean writing. Steeped in the tradition of fabulism, where the irrational and inexplicable coexist with the realities of daily life, the stories in this collection are infused with a vitality and freshness that most writing traditions have long ago lost. From spectral slaving ships to women who shed their skin at night to become owls, stories from writers such as Jamaica Kincaid, Marcia Douglas, Ian MacDonald, and Kamau Brathwaite pulse with rhythms, visions, and the tortured history of this spiritually rich region of the world.

 

 

Related Links

Nalo Hopkinson Web site
http://www.sff.net/people/nalo/

Time Warner Bookmark
http://www.twbookmark.com/authors/84/1272/


 

 

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