Days by moonlight

Alexis follows up his Scotiabank Giller Prize-winning Fifteen Dogs with this darkly funny exploration of mourning and Canadian identity, containing a touch of the surreal. Amateur botanist Alfie Homer is grieving the accidental death of his parents and a breakup from his girlfriend when family friend Professor Bruno invites him to be his driver and transcriber on a research trip. Professor Bruno is seeking information for scholarly work on poet John Skennen, who disappeared 20 years earlier and is presumed dead. They talk with Skennen's relatives, high school classmates, and former lovers, hearing strange, complex stories of riddles, witches, and possible sightings of Skennen while Alfie catalogues increasingly bizarre plants. Their journey invokes biting satire as they visit small Ontario towns where black inhabitants communicate only through sign language, residents celebrate heritage by burning historically accurate homes, and an attempt to honor indigenous peoples in a parade flounders over white people's attempts to be politically correct. After visiting the unsettling Museum of Canadian Sexuality, the professor and Alfie end up in a town with a mystical reputation and have strange experiences that spark fierce battles between the two of them about belief and the inexplicable. This imaginative travelogue will amuse readers even as it raises weightier issues. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Alexis' (The Hidden Keys, 2016, etc.) tale of two men's search for a long-missing poet is a surreal adventure through Canada's fraught racial history.Alfred Homer, a botanist at a private firm in Toronto, is grieving the first anniversary of his parents' deaths in a car accident. Even worse, his partner, Anne, has decided she doesn't want to marry him. As Alfred recovers from the dissolution of three relationships, relief arrives unexpectedly: Professor Morgan Bruno, an eccentric literary scholar and friend of his parents, calls to invite him on a research project. Bruno studies the poet John Skennen, a writer with the "talent of an angel" who mysteriously stopped publishing in the late 1990s. By driving from Toronto to the Ontario town of Feversham and visiting various small towns in between, Bruno hopes to gather details that will help him finish his biography on the lost poet. Alfred figures the trip will be a relaxing vacation. Besides, he's heard tell that oniaten, a rare plant with mysterious qualities, has been sighted on the outskirts of Feversham. The journey turns out to be an uncanny trip through a bizarre alternate-reality version of Canada. In honor of Canada's white pioneers, the town of Nobleton hosts an annual house-burning celebration, during which crowds watch local families struggle to save their homes from the flames. In neighboring Coulson's Hill, an "Indigenous Parade" offers up meager reparations for the harm Canada's First Nations suffered at the hands of those same white pioneers. Meanwhile, the town of Schomberg hosts a black population that speaks almost entirely in sign languagethe legacy of a law that banned freed American slaves from speaking aloud within the town's limits. Over the course of Alfred's journey, the book reveals itself to be a critique of Canada's white supremacist underpinnings. "I don't suppose any place reveals itself to you all at once," Alfred reflects at one point. "It comes at you in waves of associative detail." This book feels like a wave of associative detail which Alexis uses to satirize a racial history that is stranger than fiction. As the novel drags on, though, it begins to feel rudderless; the search for Skennen comes to feel like a thin premise on which to hang a string of surrealist gags. By the time Alfred and Bruno approach a mystical fate in Feversham, the reader has lost any investment in them or their journey.Funny but thin. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.