The Sleeping Car Porter

When a mudslide strands a train, Baxter, a queer Black sleeping car porter, must contend with the perils of white passengers, ghosts, and his secret love affair.

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, 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 queer 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.

Mayr's prose is vivid but never overwrought, capturing the surrealism of intense fatigue in constant motion... Readers will be captivated. - Publishers Weekly, starred review

In 1929, being a passenger train porter was fraught with challenges... Baxter's own sleep deprivation is perhaps the most intriguing character of the book. It leads to hallucinations, questionable decisions, and borderline supernatural suggestions. - Kirkus Reviews

Suzette Mayr's novel The Sleeping Car Porter is an artfully constructed story that moves, beguiles, and satisfies. - Brett Josef Grubisic, The Toronto Star

Suzette Mayr brings to life - believably, achingly, thrillingly - a whole world contained in a passenger train moving across the Canadian vastness, nearly one hundred 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. - 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize Jury

Suzette Mayr's The Sleeping Car Porter offers a richly detailed account of a particular occupation and time - train porter on a Canadian passenger train in 1929 - and unforcedly allows it to illuminate the societal strictures imposed on Black men at the time - and today. Baxter is a secretly-queer and sleep-deprived porter saving up for dental school, working a system that periodically assigns unexplained demerits, and once a certain threshold is reached, the porter loses his job. Thus, success is impossible, the best one can do is fail slowly. As Baxter takes a cross-continental run, the boarding passengers have more secrets than an Agatha Christie cast, creating a powder keg on train tracks. The Sleeping Car Porter is an engaging and illuminating novel about the costs of work, service, and secrets. - Keith Mosman, Powell's Books

I thought The Sleeping Car Porter was fantastic! It strikes a balance between being about the struggles of being Black and gay at that time while not being too heavy-handed with it. I enjoyed his constant mental maths on how many demerits he might receive for each infraction. The reader really gets a sense of the conflict that Baxter is going through. I really liked reading a book from the perspective of a porter. - Hunter Gillum, Beaverdale Books