An Impossible Blue

The long-anticipated, stunning new novel by esteemed author Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, whose last novel, Noopiming, was a Canadian bestseller and shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction and the Dublin Literary Award. An Impossible Blue is told over the course of six months from the points of view of several different characters, each of whom is navigating their way through grief over the death of Akiwenzii—a central person in each of their lives—alongside the challenges of our present historical moment. Here is a gorgeously written, emotionally affecting, genre-bending novel that explores Nishnaabe webs of social structure—and shows how several different perspectives or truths, seen through the prism of grief, blend to make a larger understanding. Of An Impossible Blue, Dionne Brand, Editorial Director of Alchemy, writes: “The stories blend myth and the contemporary and try to make a way for their protagonists to live beside and within both. They search for the synergy within worlds, how to live in the contemporary world, the attempt to retrieve the self foreclosed in/and by the contemporary. The work is both narrative and philosophical, and the structure is neither linear nor explanatory, but revelatory.” Here is a rare novel that combines tremendous beauty in the prose with Nishnaabe humour and a generous, expansive spirit in the face of pain and devastation. The voice of each unforgettable character echoes in and through all other voices, creating a work that is much greater than the sum of its parts.