***WINNER OF THE 2025 CAROL SHIELDS PRIZE FOR FICTION*** WINNER OF THE 2024 DANUTA GLEED LITERARY AWARD - SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2025 TRILLIUM BOOK AWARD - FINALIST FOR THE 2024 ATWOOD GIBSON WRITERS' TRUST FICTION PRIZE - FINALIST FOR THE 2024 GOVERNOR GENERAL'S LITERARY AWARD FOR FICTION - SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2025 SUNBURST AWARD - GLOBE AND MAIL'S BEST BOOKS OF 2024 - CBC'S BEST CANADIAN FICTION OF 2024 Groundbreaking, dazzling debut fiction from one of Canada's most exciting and admired writers. Canisia Lubrin's debut fiction is that rare work of art--a brilliant, startlingly original book that combines immense literary and political force. Its structure is deceptively simple: it departs from the infamous real-life "Code Noir," a set of historical decrees originally passed in 1685 by King Louis XIV of France defining the conditions of slavery in the French colonial empire. The original Code had fifty-nine articles; Code Noir has fifty-nine linked fictions--vivid, unforgettable, multi-layered fragments filled with globe-wise characters who desire to live beyond the ruins of the past. Ranging in style from contemporary realism to dystopia, from futuristic fantasy to historical fiction, this inventive, shape-shifting braid of stories exists far beyond the enclosures of official decrees. This is a timely, daring, virtuosic book by a young literary star. The stories are accompanied by black-and-white drawings--one at the start of each fiction--by acclaimed visual artist Torkwase Dyson. WINNER OF THE 2025 CAROL SHIELDS PRIZE FOR FICTION - WINNER OF THE 2024 DANUTA GLEED LITERARY AWARD - SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2025 TRILLIUM BOOK AWARD - FINALIST FOR THE 2024 ATWOOD GIBSON WRITERS' TRUST FICTION PRIZE - FINALIST FOR THE 2024 GOVERNOR GENERAL'S LITERARY AWARD FOR FICTION - SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2024 DANUTA GLEED LITERARY AWARD - SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2025 SUNBURST AWARD - GLOBE AND MAIL 'S BEST BOOKS OF 2024 - CBC'S BEST CANADIAN FICTION OF 2024 Groundbreaking, dazzling debut fiction from one of Canada's most exciting and admired writers. "Windham Campbell Prize-winning poet Lubrin makes her fiction debut with a thrilling and inventive collection centered on Black life in the Caribbean and the Caribbean diaspora. . . . Throughout, Lubrin plays with form and genre, interspersing traditional narratives with more experimental modes such as dramatic dialogues . . . and aphoristic writing resembling prose poetry. . . . Her gorgeous and innovative style shines on nearly every page. . . . It's a monumental achievement." -- Publishers Weekly (starred review) "A collection that is profound and inveterately inventive, Code Noir expands what is possible in the realm of narrative. With purposeful defiance, Lubrin writes stories that cut effortlessly across eras and continents with the Black diaspora, within and against a history of institutionalized violence and oppression. She pushes against the laws governing what words can and can't do, emerging finally with a sharp-edged language that is entirely sui generis . Lubrin's work is conceptual genius, allusive across a wide swath of culture, from jazz to literature to art. Code Noir is a singular achievement." --2024 Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize jury (Saeed Teebi, Joan Thomas, and Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike) "Brilliant, challenging, and ecstatic. . . . Code Noir refracts hundreds of years of history into a lively book of fictions. . . . The end result is exactly right, obscuring and countering, rewriting and reweaving, the colonial ordering of the world. . . . [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 "Original and inspiring. . . . Lubrin's poetry and prose share . . . a keen awareness of the impact of history on the common lives of those of us who live within the Black diaspora. . . . In [ Code Noir ], Lubrin's world is one in which we are continually rethinking our past, questioning our present, and inventing the future. . . . Structured, but with an improvised feel, Code Noir is a cooperative contradiction of time and space, of melody and rhythm, of Black lives and Black matters." -- The Ampersand Review "An interconnected allegory. . . . Lubrin's iconoclastic flights subvert hierarchies and cover continents and aeons of pain. . . . Torkwase Dyson's drawings depict these allegories . . . [adding] a fuller picture to Lubrin's already fulsome text." -- The Miramichi Reader (starred review) "Written in language that crackles with life and humour, the stories in Canisia Lubrin's Code Noir: Metamorphoses usher us into the lives of their narrators, lives that are filled with a kind of wonder and surprise. Such an invitation