Author Nalo Hopkinson discusses The New Moon's Arms

Reading, discussion and book signing with Nalo Hopkinson, author of the new novel The New Moon’s Arms, at Revolution Books

Nalo Hopkinson will discuss her wonderful writing which has been variously described as science fiction, magical realism, and fantasy. Her stories portray complex central female characters and are steeped in Caribbean folklore.

New Moon’s Arms protagonist is “Calamity”, a 50 year old woman who has just buried her father. The shock of his death, the contradictory feelings his passing sparks in her, and the onset of menopause contribute to strange phenomena such as trees growing up over night around her house and old toys falling from the sky. There is also the emergence of children from the sea: mysterious beings who arrived there by way of the middle passage.

Calamity discovers that love and transformation are all within her power, as her perspective is challenged by the surprising events around her and within her.

Says Nalo Hopkinson about her writing: “I grew up in a milieu of Caribbean writers and writing. I bring that sensibility to my own work, but I write within a particularly northern tradition of speculative and fantastical fiction. There, plot and content are equally important, and the speculative or fantastical elements of the story must be 'real': Duppies and jumbies [spirits of the dead] must exist outside the imaginations of the characters; any scientific extrapolation should seem convincingly based in the possible. It's an approach designed to ease or force the suspension of disbelief, to block flight back into the familiar world, to shake up the reader into thinking in new tracks.”