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The Sleeping Car Porter
Suzette Mayr
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Description for The Sleeping Car Porter
Paperback.
WINNER OF THE 2022 SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY TOP 20 LITERARY FICTION BOOKS OF 2022
OPRAH DAILY: BOOKS TO READ BY THE FIRE?
When a mudslide strands a train, Baxter, a sleeping car porter, must contend with the perils of white passengers, ghosts, and his secret love affair.
Baxter's name isn't George. But it's 1929, and Baxter is lucky enough, as a Black man, to have a job as a sleeping car porter on a train that crisscrosses the country. So when the passengers call him George, he has to just smile and nod and act invisible. ... Read moreWhat he really wants is to go to dentistry school, but he'll have to save up a lot of nickel and dime tips to get there, so he puts up with "George."
On this particular trip out west, the passengers are more unruly than usual, especially when the train is stalled for two extra days; their secrets start to leak out and blur with the sleep-deprivation hallucinations Baxter is having. When he finds a naughty postcard of two queer men, Baxter's memories and longings are reawakened; keeping it puts his job in peril, but he can't part with the postcard or his thoughts of Edwin Drew, Porter Instructor.
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Product Details
Place of Publication
, United Kingdom
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About Suzette Mayr
Suzette Mayr is the author of the novels Dr. Edith Vane and the Hares of Crawley Hall, Monoceros, Moon Honey, The Widows and Venous Hum. The Widows was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book in the Canada-Caribbean region, and has been translated into German. Moon Honey was shortlisted for the Writers' Guild of Alberta's Best First Book ... Read moreand Best Novel Awards. Monoceros won the ReLit Award, the City of Calgary W. O. Mitchell Book Prize, was longlisted for the 2011 Giller Prize and shortlisted for a Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT Fiction and the Georges Bugnet Award for Fiction. She and her partner live in a house in Calgary close to a park teeming with coyotes. Show Less
Reviews for The Sleeping Car Porter
Mayr's prose is vivid but never overwrought, capturing the surrealism of intense fatigue in constant motion . . . Readers will be captivated.
Publishers Weekly
With spry prose, an artful narrative structure, and the envelopingly confined setting of a sleeper train, The Sleeping Car Porter is richly enjoyable and replete with telling details.
Naoise Dolan In 1929, ... Read morebeing a passenger train porter was fraught with challenges...Baxter's own sleep deprivation is perhaps the most intriguing character of the book. It leads to hallucinations, questionable decisions, and borderline supernatural suggestions.
Kirkus Reviews
Suzette Mayr's novel The Sleeping Car Porter an artfully constructed story that moves, beguiles, and satisfies.
Brett Josef Grubisic
The Toronto Star
Mayr evokes the mystique of transcontinental travel and the tumult of lives on the margins in this much-anticipated period novel. All aboard!
Oprah Daily
I couldn't help imagining what a film Wes Anderson might make of Suzette Mayr's The Sleeping Car Porter.
The New York Times
Wonderfully immersive and rich with period detail, Baxter's story will grip you from start to finish. An achingly beautiful portrait of navigating systems intent on denying your humanity, and the ultimate triumph of human connection.
Angela Chadwick Suspenseful and pitch-perfectly paced, The Sleeping Car Porter captures the fascinating, lively, and absurd social life of 1920s through an unforgettable intercontinental train journey. Suzette Mayr vividly creates a claustrophobic, compartmentalised world in which the closeted desire and aspiration of a gay Black porter unfold in his fleeting encounters with passengers that are funny, scarring, and allegorical. The politics of looking and hiding sears the pages and makes me laugh, cry, and shiver.
Kit Fan I fell in love immediately with Baxter, sleeping car porter and aspiring dentist. This is a novel so richly written that I felt every bump in the track physically, and every passenger's ill-mannered slight emotionally. A wonderful book that I'll never forget.
Louise Hare The Sleeping Car Porter is a vital, visceral, exhilarating novel, written in gut-punch prose. I loved it.
Preti Taneja This is an utterly mesmerising novel. Mary's prose is truly mellifluous, each sentence a miracle that demands and rewards attention. Almost like a train itself, the action halts and pauses so that we can take a good look at each of its fascinating, complex characters before accelerating to a wondrous finish at an unexpected destination. A beautiful, deeply absorbing work.
Okechukwu Nzelu
[Mayr] conveys the intensely closeted, time-bending surrealism of a long-distance train journey with immersive, cinematic flair, not to mention the hallucinatory fantasies of an increasingly sleep-deprived Baxter who, as a character clinging to his dreams, is impossible not to get behind.
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