Sheila Murray’s brilliant book, Finding Edward, was nominated for the 2022 Governor General’s Award for Fiction. She subsequently won the 30th Annual Hamilton Literary Award, and the CBC named it one of the best works of Canadian fiction last year. This is Murray’s first novel, although that’s hard to imagine when reading it. As well as being technically dextrous, Finding Edward is deeply moving, humane and wise. 

As writer and critic Donna Bailey Nurse puts it, “In lucid, scintillating prose, suffused with mystery and everyday magic, Sheila Murray delivers one of the most penetrating dramas of Black experience in all of Canadian literature. This tale of a lonely Jamaican student enrolled at Ryerson University follows his obsession with the life of a struggling Black boy in Depression-era Toronto. A parallel portrait of two Black bi-racial men, Finding Edward expands to enfold a sweeping history of Blacks in Canada. This beautiful, necessary novel will become a touchstone.”

There’s also the fact that Finding Edward is a very good read. The praise makes the book sound intimidating, but the story of a young Jamaican man arriving in Canada is almost impossible to put down. 

The bi-racial Cyril Rowntree is the son of a Black woman living in Brown’s Town, Jamaica, and the white sailor who fathered him and left. An exceptionally clever boy, Cyril has been nurtured by a scholar named Nelson, whose house his mother cleans. When Nelson dies, he leaves Cyril with both the ambition and money to go to university in Toronto, although Cyril sits at his funeral “immersed in heartbreak and loss. Afterward, at the reception, he’d been unable to speak when Nelson’s friends asked him how he’d manage without Nelson’s tutorship, his mentorship. Cyril called it love.”

In writing about Cyril’s lonely arrival in Canada, Murray movingly details a shy young man’s attempts to make friends, and the way he draws back from exuberance; his crush on an unavailable young woman; his friendship with a disabled and mentally-distracted elder named Patricia; his encounters with a Ryerson professor who helps him and the police who brutally beat him–and his slow immersion in the community of young Black activists ready to ignite change.

Murray also gives Cyril a quest. His disabled friend Pat introduces him to a church display about a unknown Black man named Edward Davila, born seventy years before Cyril. A few intriguing papers have turned up and a church elder has displayed them, hoping to raise someone’s interest in Edward’s lost life. Cyril proves to be his man. Lonely, determined, and guided by flashes of second sight, Cyril sets out to find Edward’s story—and maybe the man himself.

At first, the novel follows Cyril’s life. But as he begins his search for the older man, the story splits. We get to know Edward through scenes of his appallingly difficult childhood and youth, through his periods of hope and happiness, through his wartime trauma and the determination with which he fights racism. We watch Edward grow into a scrappy and determined man, bi-racial like Cyril, humorous and loving, yet not always in control of himself as he faces challenge and loss.

Edward and Cyril are very different men, and it’s one of the successes of Murray’s novel that two such distinct individuals emerge. Another is her incisive exploration of Black history in Canada, as Donna Bailey Nurse observes. And then there’s the immensely moving resolution. I challenge anyone to stay dry-eyed for the final thirty pages of the book.

For the record, I first met Sheila Murray when she enrolled in my creative writing class at Ryerson, now Toronto Metropolitan University. I remember some of the incidents at Ryerson she describes. And in the years since that writing class, she has become a very good friend. 

Yet this is a book I can recommend without feeling any conflict of interest. Read it. You’ll be enthralled. 

Finding Edward by Sheila Murray is published by Cormorant Books. You can order it here.