WINNER OF THE 2022 SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE PUBLISHERS WEEKLY TOP 20
LITERARY FICTION BOOKS OF 2022 OPRAH DAILY: BOOKS TO READ BY THE
FIRE THE GLOBE 100: THE BEST BOOKS OF 2022 CBC BOOKS: THE BEST
CANADIAN FICTION OF 2022 When a mudslide strands a train, Baxter, a
queer Black sleeping car porter, must contend with the perils of
white passengers, ghosts, and his secret love affair The Sleeping
Car Porter brings to life an important part of Black history in
North America, from the perspective of a queer man living in a
culture that renders him invisible in two ways. Affecting,
imaginative, and visceral enough that you'll feel the rocking of
the train, The Sleeping Car Porter is a stunning accomplishment.
Baxter's name isn't George. But it's 1929, and Baxter is lucky
enough, as a Black man, to have a job as a sleeping car porter on a
train that crisscrosses the country. So when the passengers call
him George, he has to just smile and nod and act invisible. What he
really wants is to go to dentistry school, but he'll have to save
up a lot of nickel and dime tips to get there, so he puts up with
"George." On this particular trip out west, the passengers are more
unruly than usual, especially when the train is stalled for two
extra days; their secrets start to leak out and blur with the
sleep-deprivation hallucinations Baxter is having. When he finds a
naughty postcard of two queer men, Baxter's memories and longings
are reawakened; keeping it puts his job in peril, but he can't part
with the postcard or his thoughts of Edwin Drew, Porter Instructor.
"Suzette Mayr's The Sleeping Car Porter offers a richly detailed
account of a particular occupation and time-train porter on a
Canadian passenger train in 1929-and unforcedly allows it to
illuminate the societal strictures imposed on black men at the
time-and today. Baxter is a secretly-queer and sleep-deprived
porter saving up for dental school, working a system that
periodically assigns unexplained demerits, and once a certain
threshold is reached, the porter loses his job. Thus, success is
impossible, the best one can do is to fail slowly. As Baxter takes
a cross-continental run, the boarding passengers have more secrets
than an Agatha Christie cast, creating a powder keg on train
tracks. The Sleeping Car Porter is an engaging and illuminating
novel about the costs of work, service, and secrets." - Keith
Mosman, Powell's Books "I thought The Sleeping Car Porter was
fantastic! It strikes a balance between being about the struggles
of being black and gay at that time while not being too heavy
handed with it. I enjoyed his constant mental math on how many
demerits he might receive for each infraction. The reader really
gets a sense of the conflict that Baxter is going through. I really
liked reading a book from the perspective of a porter." - Hunter
Gillum, Beaverdale Books
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