The Sleeping Car Porter

FEATURED ON MICHELLE OBAMA'S INSTAGRAM

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2024 DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD

WINNER OF THE 2022 GILLER PRIZE

WINNER OF THE CITY OF CALGARY W.O. MITCHELL BOOK PRIZE

WINNER OF THE 2023 GEORGES BUGNET AWARD FOR FICTION

FINALIST FOR THE 2023 GOVERNOR GENERAL'S AWARD FOR ENGLISH-LANGUAGE FICTION

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY TOP 20 LITERARY FICTION BOOKS OF 2022

OPRAH DAILY: BOOKS TO READ BY THE FIRE

THE GLOBE 100: THE BEST BOOKS OF 2022

CBC BOOKS: THE BEST CANADIAN FICTION OF 2022

SHORTLISTED FOR THE CAROL SHIELDS PRIZE FOR FICTION

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2022 REPUBLIC OF CONSCIOUSNESS PRIZE

When a mudslide strands a train, Baxter, a queer Black sleeping car porter, must contend with the perils of white passengers, ghosts, and his secret love affair

The Sleeping Car Porter brings to life an important part of Black history in North America, from the perspective of a queer man living in a culture that renders him invisible in two ways. Affecting, imaginative, and visceral enough that you'll feel the rocking of the train, The Sleeping Car Porter is a stunning accomplishment.

Baxter's name isn't George. But it's 1929, and Baxter is lucky enough, as a Black man, to have a job as a sleeping car porter on a train that crisscrosses the country. So when the passengers call him George, he has to just smile and nod and act invisible. What he really wants is to go to dentistry school, but he'll have to save up a lot of nickel and dime tips to get there, so he puts up with "George."

On this particular trip out west, the passengers are more unruly than usual, especially when the train is stalled for two extra days; their secrets start to leak out and blur with the sleep-deprivation hallucinations Baxter is having. When he finds a naughty postcard of two queer men, Baxter's memories and longings are reawakened; keeping it puts his job in peril, but he can't part with the postcard or his thoughts of Edwin Drew, Porter Instructor.

"Suzette Mayr's The Sleeping Car Porter offers a richly detailed account of a particular occupation and time-train porter on a Canadian passenger train in 1929--and unforcedly allows it to illuminate the societal strictures imposed on black men at the time--and today. Baxter is a secretly-queer and sleep-deprived porter saving up for dental school, working a system that periodically assigns unexplained demerits, and once a certain threshold is reached, the porter loses his job. Thus, success is impossible, the best one can do is to fail slowly. As Baxter takes a cross-continental run, the boarding passengers have more secrets than an Agatha Christie cast, creating a powder keg on train tracks. The Sleeping Car Porter is an engaging and illuminating novel about the costs of work, service, and secrets." - Keith Mosman, Powell's Books

"I thought The Sleeping Car Porter was fantastic! It strikes a balance between being about the struggles of being black and gay at that time while not being too heavy handed with it. I enjoyed his constant mental math on how many demerits he might receive for each infraction. The reader really gets a sense of the conflict that Baxter is going through. I really liked reading a book from the perspective of a porter." - Hunter Gillum, Beaverdale Books

Suzette Mayr is the author of six novels including her most recent, The Sleeping Car Porter, winner of the 2022 Giller Prize, the Georges Bugnet Award for Fiction, and the City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize. The novel was also shortlisted for the inaugural Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, and the Republic of Consciousness Prize (US and Canada). Mayr's other novels have won the ReLit Award and City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize, and been nominated for the Commonwealth Prize for Best Book in the Canada-Caribbean Region, the Writers' Guild of Alberta's Best First Book and Best Novel Awards, and the Ferro- Grumley Award for LGBT Fiction. Mayr has done interdisciplinary work with Calgary theatre company Theatre Junction, and visual artists Lisa Brawn and Geoff Hunter. She has also published articles in journals such as Horror Studies, Studies in Canadian Literature, and The Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature. She is a former President of the Writers' Guild of Alberta. Mayr teaches Creative Writing at the University of Calgary, and is a Killam Laureate.