Perfect Books
Presents Kai Thomas
Hosted by Adrian Harwood
In Person Fiction
Fresh and propulsive. . . . Thomas uses evocative detail and immersive description to explore slavery in Canada, a country that has been mythologized as an escape from the institution. . . . He also deftly makes clear the interconnectedness and rippling traumas it caused from Africa to the Caribbean to the Americas. . . . [In the Upper Country] is a testament to the power of story and a veneration of those whose tales are often forgotten in mainstream media.
The fates of two unforgettable women—one just beginning a journey of reckoning and self-discovery and the other completing her life's last vital act—intertwine in this sweeping, deeply researched debut set in the Black communities of Ontario that were the last stop on the Underground Railroad.
Sweeping along the path of the Underground Railroad from the southern States to Canada, through the lands of Indigenous nations around the Great Lakes, to the Black communities of southern Ontario, In the Upper Country weaves together unlikely stories of love, survival, and familial upheaval that map the interconnected history of the peoples of North America in an entirely new and resonant way.
