Canadian novelist Esi Edugyan is revered for tapping historical veins in pursuit of untold stories: “[I]t’s a natural curiosity about footnotes – historical footnotes. Things that we haven’t heard about,” she told Quill & Quire. Her richly imagined and impeccably researched stories illuminate complicated truths about race and belonging, and they have twice won her the Scotiabank Giller Prize, Canada’s most prestigious literary award. Such was the case with Washington Black, her newest book that starts as an antebellum novel before taking on a post-slavery narrative about a young slave who is pulled from the fields of an 1830s Barbados sugar plantation to become a manservant to an abolitionist and inventor. Washington Black was named one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Slate, TIME and Entertainment Weekly. It was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, longlisted for the PEN Open Book Award, and landed her second Giller Prize. The Washington Post calls it “terrifically exciting . . . An engrossing hybrid of 19th-century adventure and contemporary subtlety, a rip-roaring tale of peril imbued with our most persistent strife . . . Discover what the rest of the world already knows: Edugyan is a magical writer.” Edugyan’s other critically acclaimed works include the novels Half-Blood Blues and The Second Life of Samuel Tyne, and a  nonfiction collection, Dreaming of Elsewhere: Observations on Home.