HALF-BLOOD BLUES By Esi Edugyan (Thomas Allen) Set in Baltimore, Berlin and Paris, Scotiabank Giller Prize-winner Half-Blood Blues spans from just after the First World War to the 1990s, but centres on the months leading up to the Nazi occupation of Paris. It chronicles the increasingly deadly trials of an interracial jazz band in which the trumpeter, a German of African descent, is arrested. – Donna Bailey Nurse