Saga Boy

Reviews

Shortlisted for the 2021 Speaker's Book Award
Longlisted for the Toronto Book Award

One of:
CBC's "BEST CANADIAN NONFICTION OF 2021"
Bustle's "The Most Anticipated Books of September 2021"

Praise for Saga Boy:

“[A] deeply moving memoir . . . [and] lyrical story. . . . Suffused with poetic prose that jumps off the page, this inspiring account sings.”
—Publishers Weekly *STARRED REVIEW*

"Powerful and beautifully written."
—Toronto Star

“An engaging narrative about the search for home, belonging, and identity.… [Saga Boy is] intriguing, passionate, and often moving.”
—Kirkus Reviews  

"Downing's lush language and sensory details make the fascinating events of this memoir pop. An authentic, entertaining, and timely account of a creative immigrant's experiences."
—Booklist

"Downing's elegant, engaging memoir will have particular significance to readers from the Caribbean diaspora, but it will be understood by any reader who has ever had their world suddenly upended and needed to make it whole again."
—Library Journal

“Downing’s heart-wrenching memoir chronicles his saga of trying on and casting off many masks, learning the dimensions of the face through which he sees the world and the world sees him.”
—BookPage

“Compelling . . . Saga Boy is an eloquent memoir about Antonio Michael Downing's experiences as an immigrant in a minority population; it centers his resilience."
―Foreword Reviews, Starred Review

“Downing’s elegant, engaging memoir will have particular significance to readers from the Caribbean diaspora, but it will be understood by any reader who has ever had their world suddenly upended and needed to make it whole again.”
—Library Journal

“Antonio Michael Downing’s Saga Boy is a vibrant, evocative, and searing account of the lives of Black immigrants. Downing helps us understand the rage and resilience of Black boys—motherless, fatherless, itinerant—and the communities that intervene to raise them. The triumph of Saga Boy is the triumph of Blackness everywhere—the irrepressible instinct for survival in a world where Blacks are prey.”
—Ian Williams, Giller Prize–winning author of Reproduction

“Saga Boy is an emotionally captivating, heartbreaking read on one man’s journey to understand who he is, where he comes from and where he belongs. From being the only Black family in Wabigoon to moving transformatively through the music scene in the city, Saga Boy makes us all question the strength of the ties that bind and where our future lies.”
—Tanya Talaga, author of Seven Fallen Feathers and All Our Relations

“Downing transports readers to the steamy, scented jungle of Trinidad where he lived with his grandmother as a child. Miss Excelly stands with ramrod dignity, glories in the Lord’s love, and jumps off the page with her strength, her joy, and her suffering. As Faulkner created the powerful Dilsey in The Sound and the Fury, Downing has created Miss Excelly. A story of resilience and character, Saga Boy is bound to become a Canadian classic.”
—Catherine Gildiner, author of Good Morning, Monster and Too Close to the Falls

“In Saga Boy, Antonio Michael Downing offers expertise and experience, intellect and intimacy; this is a book that names the griefs and violences of colonialism and insists on the tentacular ways they reach into all facets of being. It is also a book about kinship, pleasure, celebration, and love. Saga Boy is the story of a remarkable life, one both relatable and not, told with intricacy. It charts the ways space and time shape people into many, discernible persons within a lifetime. Truly unforgettable.”
—Jenny Heijun Wills, author of Older Sister, Not Necessarily Related

“In the bespoke tome of impossible stories, Antonio Michael Downing’s Saga Boy enters the arena through its own misshapen doorway. Downing’s liquid, deeply felt memoir thrums with the materials of a life forged in the chaotic deficiencies of the British Empire. With a hallucinatory blend of earthquake-like drama, storm-like retrospection and a dreamscape of sounds that stretch from the Caribbean to Europe to Canada, he sees the hurricanes that colonial subjugation has made into his life and raises it a boy who is held by the dissolved dimensions where Blackness is not an appeal for human identity but the resolute, world-shifting creativity and power and dream of those who live well beyond the anaemic imaginations that create such harm. Even through catastrophe, the fevered scale of Downing’s story is testament to how actions—against all odds, and again, against the follies of the self—are made from the elegant and jagged spaces where generations hold each other, even in unlikely places. Read this book and witness this particular story of a struggle for transcendent becoming.”
—Canisia Lubrin, author of The Dyzgraphxst

“Downing seamlessly blends poetic images, music, and storytelling to create a poignant and stunningly honest memoir of a young man’s adamant determination to navigate his position and find himself despite the boundaries of colonialism, racism, and the endless sense of disbelonging.”
—Lamees al Ethari, author of Waiting for the Rain: An Iraqi Memoir and From the Wounded Banks of the Tigris

“Singularly dazzling, Saga Boy is a brilliant collage of the twenty-first century's most incredible memoirs. Told with an unforgettable and innovative pace, this a book I will reread forever.”
—Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy

“[In Saga Boy,] Downing deploys spectacular details in describing [his] childhood years, the sights, sounds and violence of that place and time. The prose in those early passages is exalted and melodic. Even as the tremendous care in its crafting seems evident, the words also flow naturally. Downing never seems to press. We see vast and granular marvels through the eyes of a child still capable of awe.”
—Star Tribune Expand reviews