In a free-Black community in southern Ontario, a loner who writes for one of the black papers is asked to interview an old woman who murdered a slave catcher. The old woman will only tell her story if the interviewer offers stories in exchange, and we're off to the races. Based on the jacket, I was expecting this to a battle of wills, or storytelling competition, but the storytelling includes a found document element, and it ends up being more of a family history jigsaw puzzle. 

And all of the pieces are so interesting! Part of the frame of the story is that the journalist is trying to make the old woman's story fit into a slave narrative palatable to the White abolitionist press, and how so many Black stories have been flattened by that. And boy, it doesn't fit. None of the stories fit. The other main theme is the relationship between Black and Indigenous people, from the Carolinas and Kentucky, up through Ontario and Quebec.

This novel (the author's first) was trying to do a lot of things, and I think it landed at least a lot of them, though I'm not entirely sure the whole came together for me the same way as it did in the author's head. I might understand the book better on a second reading, because there were so many layers of story upon story, all told out of sequence, that I got somewhat lost. (I would've found a family tree helpful, at some point.) I also felt that while Thomas did try to differentiate the storytelling voices, it did come off a bit samey in the end, though that's something I'm often overly picky about, so ymmv.

Which is not to say I didn't like the book! I enjoyed the hell out of the characters, and am really looking forward to what Thomas decides to do next. I think he's only going to get better.