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Any Known Blood

An Excerpt

I have the rare distinction — a distinction that weighs like a wet life jacket, but that I sometimes float to great advantage — of not appearing to belong to any particular race, but of seeming like a contender for many.

In Spain, people have wondered if I was French. In France, hotel managers asked if I was Moroccan. In Canada, I've been asked — always tentatively — if I was perhaps Peruvian, American, or Jamaican. But I have rarely given a truthful rendering of my origins.

Once, someone asked, "Are you from Madagascar? I know a man from Madagascar who looks like you."

I said: "As a matter of fact, I am. I was born in the capital, Antananarivo. We moved to Canada when I was a teenager."

Another time, when a man sitting next to me in a donut shop complained about Sikh refugees arriving by boat in Gander, Newfoundland, I said: "I was born in Canada and I don't wear a turban, but I'm a Sikh. My mother is white, but my father is a Sikh and that makes me one, too." The man's mouth fell open. I paid the waitress to bring him twelve chocolate donuts. "I've gotta go," I told him. "But the next time you want to run down Sikhs, just remember that one of them bought you a box of donuts!"

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Reviews

"Any Known Blood is an intricate but not a complicated novel. Hill is a wonderful storyteller, never a reformer or a preacher, and despite the novel's meandering length its narrative line is clear and purposeful and translucent, imbued with a richness that enriches."
The Montreal Gazette

"Any Known Blood illuminates 150 years of little-known black experience on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border. At the same time, Hill's characters remain deeply realized creations who exert a strong imaginative pull…It is Hill's subtle treatment of the contemporary obsession with group identity that gives Any Known Blood its power."
Maclean's

"Lawrence Hill masterfully threads the history of the five generations of men named Langston Cane into an engaging commentary of changing times…Hill's depth, skill and objectivity come to the fore…allowing him to weave a story of prejudice, segregation and slavery without slamming it into a sermon."
The Toronto Star