The Sleeping Car Porter is an engaging and illuminating novel about the costs of work, service, and secrets.' - Keith Mosman, Powell's Books 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.

Thus, success is impossible, the best one can do is to fail slowly. 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. '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. 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. 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. 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.' So when the passengers call him George, he has to just smile and nod and act invisible. 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. Affecting, imaginative, and visceral enough that you'll feel the rocking of the train, The Sleeping Car Porter is a stunning accomplishment.īaxter's name isn't George. 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. 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 PUBLISHERS WEEKLY TOP 20 LITERARY FICTION BOOKS OF 2022ĬBC BOOKS: THE BEST CANADIAN FICTION OF 2022 WINNER OF THE 2022 SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE

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