A Minor Chorus

Praise

*WINNER OF THE 2023 BC AND YUKON ETHEL WILSON PRIZE*
*LONGLISTED FOR THE 2022 SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE*
*LONGLISTED FOR THE 2024 DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD*

Named a Best Book of the Year by the Globe and Mail, Indigo, and CBC

“No one breaks your heart as elegantly as Billy-Ray Belcourt. Innovative, intimate, and meticulous, A Minor Chorus is a thoughtful riot of intersections and juxtapositions, a congregation of keenly observed laments gently vivisecting the small, Northern Alberta community at its core.”
—Eden Robinson, author of Son of a Trickster
 
“The literary child of Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy and James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, this novel builds on both, and is yet still something so new. It has the guts to centre Indigenous queer life as worthy of serious intellectual and artistic inquiry—which, of course, it always has been. We will be reading and re-reading and learning from A Minor Chorus for decades to come.”
—Alicia Elliott, author of A Mind Spread Out on the Ground
 
“An absolutely dazzling confluence of big ideas and raw emotions, told in Billy-Ray Belcourt’s singular poetic voice. A Minor Chorus is about loving, questioning, and fighting for your life, and it’s as compelling a debut novel as I’ve read in years.”
—Jami Attenberg, author of I Came All This Way to Meet You
 
“A truly exceptional novel about how the disregarded sometimes live the most remarkable lives, and how storytelling will redeem us somehow, make us less lonely. A Minor Chorus is like a song that’s over too soon; I want to play it on repeat, to memorize the words so that I can sing them to myself.”
—Katherena Vermette, author of The Strangers

“An achingly gorgeous debut novel of Indigenous survival. . . This is a breathtaking and hypnotic achievement.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Registers less as minor chorus than symphony . . . Belcourt’s boldest, freest, and most linguistically assured work yet.”
—Library Journal (starred review)

“Poet Billy-Ray Belcourt’s first novel is, unsurprisingly, a genre-defying masterpiece . . . . This book is unlike anything else I’ve ever read: it’s academic and anti-academic, full of poetry, longing, theory, and philosophy.”
—Book Riot

“Belcourt crafts sentences like only a poet can, each one precise and shimmering. He writes with ferocious intensity and beauty about Grindr hookups, queer Indigenous friendship, police violence, the open wounds of Canada’s residential schools, loneliness, and longing.”
—BookPage
 
“Belcourt is a brilliant writer and this book is further proof.”
—Them