The Sleeping Car Porter brings to life an important part of Black history in North America, from the perspective of a gay 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 gay 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. (From Coach House Books)

Suzette Mayr is a poet and novelist based in Calgary. She is the author of the novels Dr. Edith Vane and the Hares of Crawley Hall, Monoceros, Moon Honey, The Widows and Venous Hum. Monoceros won the ReLit Award, the City of Calgary W. O. Mitchell Book Prize and made the 2011 Scotiabank Giller Prize longlist.

The Sleeping Car Porter won the 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize.

From the 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize jury: "Suzette Mayr brings to life — believably, achingly, thrillingly — a whole world contained in a passenger train moving across the Canadian vastness, nearly 100 years ago. As only occurs in the finest historical novels, every page in The Sleeping Car Porter feels alive and immediate — and eerily contemporary. The sleeping car porter in this sleek, stylish novel is named R.T. Baxter — called George by the people upon whom he waits, as is every other Black porter. Baxter's dream of one day going to school to learn dentistry coexists with his secret life as a gay man, and in Mayr's triumphant novel we follow him not only from Montreal to Calgary, but into and out of the lives of an indelibly etched cast of supporting characters, and, finally, into a beautifully rendered radiance."

"One of the things that I want people to take away from this book is to be nice to people in the service industry. It's important that Black people become part of the fabric of the history of this country. It gets a little tiring when the only time you talk about it is in February because it's Black History Month. It's every month. It's everywhere.

"It's all the time, and it's not necessarily about Black pain or suffering or victimhood. The porters were important in helping to establish a Black middle class, one that had a ton of impact in all kinds of ways including labour rights.

"This particular group worked really hard to get ahead. I'm not necessarily related to one of these porters, as far as I know, but they've paved the way for me in all kinds of ways.

"Black history matters, every month of the year."