Publishers Weekly
★ 09/12/2022
Memoirist Belcourt (A History of My Brief Body) delivers an achingly gorgeous debut novel of Indigenous survival. The unnamed narrator, a 24-year-old queer Cree graduate student living in Edmonton, Alberta, has stalled on his dissertation in critical theory. He decides to leave the program and return home to northern Alberta to write a novel. For research, he interviews locals, including a great-aunt whose grandson has been arrested and a newspaper editor who never came out as gay after losing his first love to suicide. Even the narrator’s depiction of a hookup with a visiting white man veers into a precise, insightful excavating of trauma. A trip to the nearby residential school sparks an unpleasant encounter with an entitled white woman before the narrator returns to Edmonton for one last interview. Belcourt weaves in a steady stream of references to work by Judith Butler, Roland Barthes, and Maggie Nelson without losing narrative momentum, and he delivers incendiary reflections on the costs, scars, and power of history and community. This is a breathtaking and hypnotic achievement. (Oct.)
Jami Attenberg
"An absolutely dazzling confluence of big ideas and raw emotions, told in Billy-Ray Belcourt’s singular poetic voice. A Minor Chorus is about loving, questioning, and fighting for your life, and it’s as compelling a debut novel as I’ve read in years."
Alicia Elliott
"A Minor Chorus is a rare gem of a book. We will be reading and rereading A Minor Chorus for decades to come."
Katherena Vermette
"A truly exceptional novel about how the disregarded sometimes live the most remarkable lives. A Minor Chorus is like a song that’s over too soon; I want to play it on repeat, to memorize the words so that I can sing them to myself."
Eden Robinson
"No one breaks your heart as elegantly as Billy-Ray Belcourt. Innovative, intimate, and meticulous."
Booklist - Kathy Sexton
"Following his essay collection, A History of My Brief Body, poet Belcourt, from the Driftpile Cree Nation, continues his exploration of Indigenous trauma and queerness in this erudite debut novel…Smart, thoughtful."
BookPage (starred review) - Laura Sackton
"A Minor Chorus is a feat of technical brilliance, a novel that questions the worth of writing even as it asserts its own value. It is a slippery, scholarly work, rooted in the layered complexity of Indigenous life."
Library Journal
05/01/2022
A Lamba Literary Award winner and Canada's top-selling poet (see the LJ best-booked NDN Coping Mechanisms), Belcourt crafts a debut novel about a queer Indigenous doctoral student in Northern Alberta who temporarily deserts his dissertation to write a novel. Meanwhile, he converses with the closeted Michael and fellow student River and ponders a cousin trapped in the awful cycle of police violence, drugs, and despair.
