Reproduction

a novel by Ian Williams

A HILARIOUS AND POIGNANT LOVE STORY ABOUT WHAT HAPPENS WHEN STRANGERS BECOME FAMILY

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2021 DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD
WINNER OF THE 2019 SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE
SHORTLISTED FOR THE TORONTO BOOK AWARD
SHORTLISTED FOR THE AMAZON FIRST NOVEL AWARD

“This gorgeous novel vibrates with life…. Stylistically inventive and narratively compelling, Reproduction is stunning.”
— AMINATTA FORNA, author of The Memory of Love

“Williams’s imaginative, intricate tapestries are dazzling […] In his rich probes of language and intimacy, legacy and inheritance, he slyly shows that reproduction is consequential, but so is everything else.” — THE NEW YORK TIMES

“Captivating…. The consequences of procreation between unsuited partners—a lifetime of misery and the likelihood of subsequent generations repeating the same mistakes—are explored with subtlety and wit over the novel’s four decades….There’s a fluidity and zest to Williams’s insightful writing, underpinned by numerous experiments with form and style: a flow-chart illustrating a character’s thought process; absent-minded asides embedded in a smaller font within sentences; and short paragraphs, sometimes just a couple of lines, that read as distilled prose poems…. Williams has a penchant for juggling multiple perspectives…. A finely balanced novel.” — THE GUARDIAN

“Vastly enjoyable…. Top-notch comic dialogue makes this light-footed navigation of race and gender politics fizz on the page, as the steady dopamine hit of Williams's deliciously juicy phrasemaking works in tandem with typographical high-jinks that look gimmicky but earn their keep.” — DAILY MAIL UK

“Innovative, smart, funny, joyous, poetic, generous and forgiving of human foibles. Reproduction is Williams’s first book of fiction, but it is clear he will be around for a long while.” — ALEKSANDAR HEMON, author of The Lazarus Project

“Ian Williams’s Reproduction is many things at once. It’s an engrossing story of disparate people brought together and also a masterful unfolding of unexpected connections and collisions between and across lives otherwise separated by race, class, gender and geography. It’s a pointed and often playful plotting out of individual and shared stories in the close spaces of hospital rooms, garages, mansions and apartments, and a symphonic performance of resonant and dissonant voices, those of persons wanting to impress persuade, deny, or beguile others, and always trying again.”
— JURY CITATION, Scotiabank Giller Prize

Told with the savvy of Zadie Smith, Reproduction is a tale of love among inherited and invented families. Ian Williams’ rambunctious novel sweeps through a world of racial and religious mash-ups, cultural collisions, and cross-pollinations galore. Consider only three of them: Felicia, Army, and Riot.

Felicia Shaw never planned on getting pregnant. But here she is, a young woman from a little-known Caribbean island who can’t be pregnant with Edgar Gross’s baby. Because he’s a married man. Because he’s a married German man who is more than twice her age and who doesn’t want any children. Also because he had a vasectomy.

Then there is Army, her son. Turns out that Army has big plans for his life and a huge capacity for denial. He wants to earn 100K with his garage barbershop by the time he’s sixteen, and by twenty-one he plans to have a cool million. That is, if he can manage the upstairs landlord, Oliver, a needy, volatile, recently divorced man whose teenage daughter is now pregnant. Baby? What baby?

And Riot—Oliver’s grandson, child of a child—all he wants to do is make art films. Who cares if he’s about to be kicked out of school for making porn?

Beginning in a palliative care ward and ending in a cancer ward, Reproduction is the twenty-first-century proof of John Lennon’s famous claim that “life is what happens while you are busy making other plans.” It is the story of strangers from strange places who accidentally become forever tangled.

Ian Williams on the front of the Canadian supplement of Publishers Weekly, October 2020

Read an excerpt
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The Career of Ian Williams

See also
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RIGHTS SOLD

US: Europa Editions, April 2020
Canada: Random House, January 2019
UK: Dialogue Books/Little, Brown, July 2020
World English Audio: Audible
Italy: Keller Editore

100,000 words hardcover
Final books now available

(Photo: Justin Morris)

ABOUT IAN WILLIAMS

Ian Williams is the author of the novel Reproduction, which was the winner of the 2019 Scotiabank Giller Prize and was published in the U.S., U.K., and Italy; Personals which was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Robert Kroetsch Poetry Book Award; Not Anyone’s Anything, winner of the Danuta Gleed Literary Award for the best first collection of short fiction in Canada, and You Know Who You Are, a finalist for the ReLit Prize for poetry. In 2020 he published his latest poetry collection, Word Problems. In fall 2021 he released Disorientation: Being Black in the World, which was shortlisted for the Hilary Weston Writers Trust Prize for Non-Fiction and the BC Book Prize for Non-Fiction. He has been named the 2024 CBC Massey Lecturer.

Williams is Professor of English at the University of Toronto, where he is Director of the Creative Writing Program and Academic Advisor. He completed his doctorate in English there and spent four years teaching poetry in the Creative Writing Department at the University of British Columbia. In 2014-2015 he was the Writer-in-Residence for the University of Calgary's Distinguished Writers Program. He has held fellowships or residencies from Vermont Studio Center, the Banff Center, Cave Canem, the William Southam Journalism Fellowship, and the National Humanities Center. In the summer of 2022 he was a Visiting Fellow at the American Library in Paris. He is currently on the board of the Griffin Poetry Prize.

Williams writes book reviews for The Guardian and has written articles for The Globe and Mail, Maclean’s, The Toronto Star, Hazlitt, Sportsnet.ca, Publishers Weekly, The Walrus, Lithub, Granta, and the Italian journals Sotto Il Vulcano (Feltrinelli), and Civlità delle Macchine (Fondazione Leonardo). Born in Trinidad, Williams grew up in Brampton, Ontario, and has worked in Massachusetts and Ontario.

Click here for a summary of awards and titles.

PRAISE FOR REPRODUCTION

“…This work successfully examines major themes of empathy, responsibility, secrecy, race, multiculturalism, misogyny, and honesty.” — LIBRARY JOURNAL, starred review

“Williams’s unsparing view on the past’s repetition is heartrending. This ambitious experiment yields worthwhile results.” — PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

“Driven as much by its relationships as its characters, and is intensified and enriched by an inventive style that borrows from Williams’s giant poet’s brain.”
 — THE GLOBE AND MAIL

“Don’t let the 550-page count fool you: The writing style is the opposite of weighty and dense—it is mischievous, funny, moving, and full of stunning revelations about how strangers become family. Simply breathtaking!”
 — Kelly Justice, Fountain Bookstore, Richmond, VA (American Booksellers Association)

“Reproduction’s genius is its weaponized empathy, the precision-etched intensity of Williams’ gritty, witty, wholly unsentimental exploration of the collision of human hearts and the messy aftermath. Love, and its lack, form a spectrum that the characters bounce between, searching for connections, redemption and meaning.”— EDEN ROBINSON, author of Son of a Trickster and Trickster Drift

“The startling brilliance of Ian Williams stems from his restlessness with form. His ceaseless creativity in sussing out the right patterning of story, the right vernacular nuance, the right diagram and deftly dropped reference—all in service of vividly illuminating the intermingled comedy and trauma of family.”
— DAVID CHARIANDY, author of Brother and I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You

“In Williams' book, human reproduction becomes the container of numerous themes: the female body (in its declinations of race and class), parenthood (rejected, sought after, and suffered), and the family (natural, acquired or chosen)…. The absence of punctuation in the dialogue and the mixture of it with the thoughts—interrupted, resumed, and misaligned—of the characters open a direct and particularly successful line of communication with the reader's head.” — LA REPUBBLICA, Italy

“There is an entire modern Canadian literature that fortunately arrives in Italy and shows what is possible with words…. In this brainy structure, Williams puts all his ability to experiment by generating a novel that reproduces itself, in a complicated yet brilliant metaphor of the process of forming a family, the center of the analysis contained in "Reproduction": how it is formed, how it crumbles before it is even born, how it survives or reforms out of necessity.” — L'INDIEPENDENTE, Italy

“He has no doubts, Vittorio Graziani, our trusted bookseller. You ask him what are the books to give away at Christmas and he replies: ‘The book to give this year for me is only one. The number 1. Reproduction by Ian Williams, published by Keller Edizioni.’” — AMICA, Italy

Author Ian Williams is the newest inductee into the Brampton Arts Walk of Fame