Brown Girl in the Ring

Hopkinson’s stunning debut plunges the reader into a wildly inventive future Toronto. She seamlessly weaves together the politics of race, class, and gender, inflected with the rich culture and history of the Caribbean diaspora.

Despite the grim post-apocalyptic setting, the characters are part of a community, surviving through solidarity and mutual aid. There are no easy answers or neat resolutions to be found here—the fraught, tenuous connections between families and lovers are messy and grounded.

Sadly, many of the elements of this 1998 novel have proven prophetic, and this book is still a clarion call 25 years later.

Nalo Hopkinson's first novel swept a bunch of awards when it came out in 1999. At the time, there was nothing else like it. The novel puts structural racism and the systemic abandonment of urban Black people in the 20th century front and center, framing them against a struggling, post-collapse future inner city Toronto drenched in West African myth and magic. I think of it as an ur-text of modern solarpunk. This book opened my eyes to the repressed history of environmental injustice in North American cities; it got me started on the research quest that would one day give… show more.