Dreaming of Elsewhere

# 6 on the Edmonton Journal's Bestsellers list (Edmonton Nonfiction) for the week of April 25, 2014

"Newcomers now are educated, eloquent and outspoken. Much will change, and some things will not change at all.... Edugyan is one of the accomplished voices of the New Immigrant Experience.... In Dreaming of Elsewhere she recounts the familiar story of conflict and disconnection known to many first-generation Canadians.... Dreaming of Elsewhere is vivid and intimate. This is the voice of change." Holly Doan, Blacklock's Reporter, accessed May 27, 2014 [Full review at http://www.blacklocks.ca/review-big-plans]

“Given that our human ancestors began their migrations more than 100,000 years ago, ‘home’ must always have been an idea as well as a physical location, ‘where we come from, and where we are,’ as Esi Edugyan writes in her new book. Home is ‘the actual and the possible.’… Edugyan knows that home, whether a physical location or an idea, is never static. Where we belong—or, more painfully, are forbidden from belonging—alters.… Confronted by the question of whether North America has reached a post-racial age and a colour-blind society, Edugyan answers simply and courageously: ‘I confess I find the notion ridiculous’.” [Full review at http://bit.ly/X8Z6mY] ~Madeleine Thien, Literary Review of Canada

“…Esi Edugyan offers an eloquent meditation on identity, culture and belonging in Dreaming of Elsewhere: Observations on Home.… A wise, elegant and engrossing read.” ~Evelyn C. White, Herizons

"Thinking through her own story of living in many countries in her late twenties, and revisiting her parents' country of origin, Ghana, in 2006, Edugyan reflects that 'I, who had lived so much of my life looking elsewhere, was slowly coming to acknowledge that non-belonging, also, can be a kind of belonging.'... To consider belonging a paramount objective, Edugyan suggests, runs the risk of enforcing 'a simple "us" vs. "them" manner of thinking.'" ~Lorraine York, Canadian Literature