(CNN) -- Imagine a smoke-filled jazz club, dark and crowded. The sounds of a trumpet solo echo on stage, while a piano, bass and drums pound out a finger-snapping groove. You can almost smell the cigarette smoke, taste the cheap booze being served. This is Berlin, 1939 -- the eve of World War II. These are the Hot Time Swingers, the imagined jazz band at the center of Esi Edugyan's "Half-Blood Blues." The novel was a finalist for Britain's prestigious Man Booker prize in 2011 and reaches U.S. bookstores this week. The story is told through the eyes of the Swingers' bass player, Sid Griffiths, in alternating takes between events in Paris and Berlin in 1939 and Baltimore and Berlin in 1992. The novel captures the end of the jazz age in Germany perfectly in the characters' staccato slang, sounding much like jazz music imagined as dialogue. Offstage, the story captures the paranoia and fear of the days leading up to the start of the war, and the racial tension of the time period.
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"Half-Blood Blues" captures end of jazz age in 1930s Germany in characters' staccato slang
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Novel conveys the paranoia leading up to start of World War II and racial tension of the time
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As Canadian-born daughter of Ghanaian immigrants, "I grew up between worlds," novelist says
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Esi Edugyan says a sense of uprootedness "lies at the heart of this novel"
She was born and raised in @placeholder, the daughter of immigrant parents from Ghana.