In the Upper Country: A Novel

"First of all, this book—which is Kai Thomas’s first novel—is marvellously done, technically speaking. It’s stories-within-stories, a bit like Scheherazade . There are two women, one old, one young, telling each other stories and these stories and how they tell them are intrinsic to the book. It’s a brave construction, and very successful. The novel is set not on the Underground Railway by which Black people fleeing from slavery crossed the border into Canada, but in the free town established at the end of the Railway. We’re in the complicated world of individuals from different communities – the Black community, the Indigenous community, the Métis community – whose histories are rich and whose choices are complex. Everybody wants ‘freedom’ but freedom is more complicated than it sounds, as we learn through the aftermath of the shooting of a slave hunter by an old woman. In most novels, the propulsion is forward. In In the Upper Country , the energy is more flexible, flowing forwards and backwards, sweeping the reader along as if in the tide, never ceasing, but you’re not always sure exactly where you’ll find yourself. In other words, the experience of reading is more like sitting and listening to a storyteller, which is just as it should be given the construction of the book. But don’t misunderstand me. The stories aren’t random. Each story is a small revelation, so it’s like doing a jigsaw when you haven’t got the picture on the front of the box. You’re there, in this book, piecing it all together. Particularly for a first novel, In the Upper Country is very sure of itself and confidence is such a big thing in writing, particularly in a novel like this. If the author is confident, you feel carried along. Exactly. The author is saying: this way, no, this way. Come with me. It’ll be okay. So interesting that according to the blurb at the back of the book Kai Thomas is a carpenter. I wonder if that helps with putting a novel like this together, whether you think in a different way about what the finished artefact will look like, how it will work, what’s underneath the polished surface. I don’t know."