Code Noir

Reviews / Votes

'Code Noir is a revelation... This book sings in searing language, telling stories that bristle and challenge, comfort and question.' Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King, short-listed for the Booker Prize 'This single book holds a universe. Code Noir is monumental and intimate, rigorous and tender. Canisia Lubrin is one of the most extraordinary writers working today.' Madeleine Thien, author of Do Not Say We Have Nothing 'The collection displays tremendous stylistic breadth... The overall effect is a dizzying, disorienting view of "history's wide grave".' The New Yorker 'An interconnected allegory... Lubrin's iconoclastic flights subvert hierarchies and cover continents and aeons of pain.' The Miramichi Reader (starred review) 'Crackles with life and humor... In its formal inventiveness and sheer audaciousness, Code Noir is unlike anything else that I've ever read. Lubrin is a force.' Christina Sharpe, author of In the Wake 'Code Noir is storytelling at its deepest and most intimate.... These stories are magic, and you must enter them as if you, too, are wondrous.' Dionne Brand, author of A Map to the Door of No Return 'This is a brilliant work of literature by a virtuosic writer, and you must read it.' Anakana Schofield, author of Malarky 'A singular achievement.' Souvankham Thammavongsa, author of How to Pronounce Knife 'A book that radiates life - insistent, unbounded life... A virtuosic assembling of genres, voices, and experiences...with lines gripping the heart and stories suffused with beauty and tenderness.' David Chariandy, author of Brother 'Brilliant, challenging, and ecstatic... A dazzling achievement.' The Globe and Mail 'Visceral, disruptive... Astonishing... Canisia Lubrin has turned her attention to fiction in her striking new work, Code Noir... Play[ing] with form, time, and polyvocality... Grounded in the making and unmaking of historical narratives of Black diasporic experience.' Winnipeg Free Press 'This is a formidable, daring work that reclaims history while interrogating the present. Across 59 linked stories, Canisia transforms an instrument of oppression into a prism for resistance, imagination and survival. The writing is razor-sharp, lyrical and politically urgent, moving fluidly between realism, dystopia and myth. Paired with striking visual art, the book is like an incantation. Read it.' Service95 'In Code Noir, Canisia Lubrin takes one of the most brutal legal documents of the colonial era and transforms it into an audacious work of literary resistance ... Lubrin's prose is dense, luminous, and uncompromising, demanding attentiveness while rewarding it with moments of clarity and emotional force ... Code Noir is not simply a response to history but an insistence on its unfinished reckoning.' Voice Mag