TORONTO - Baby, Booker prize, book release: Victoria author Esi Edugyan certainly has a lot on her mind these days as she raises her newborn and awaits word on whether her second novel, "Half-Blood Blues," is a finalist for the Man Booker Prize.

The short list for Britain's most prestigious literary award, worth 50,000 pounds (about C$79,000), will be unveiled on Tuesday -- just days after "Half-Blood Blues" hit stores in Canada and just over two weeks after the birth of her daughter.

You can probably guess which of the three is her top priority.

"I'm just obsessed with the baby. There's no time for anything else really," Edugyan, 33, said with a chuckle recently by phone from her home.

"It's just (all about) the first baby ... looking after her and falling in love with her. She's just a lovely little girl.

"Of course the short list announcement is in the back of my head, but you're trying not to think about it because you don't know what the outcome will be."

"Half-Blood Blues," about a group of black jazz musicians trying to survive in Europe during the Second World War, is one of three Canadian novels on this year's Booker long list. The others are "The Sisters Brothers" by Vancouver Island native Patrick deWitt and "Far To Go" by Toronto-born Alison Pick.

Edugyan, who is married to poet and novelist Steven Price, said it was "utterly incredible" when she made the long list of 13 contenders in July.

"I thought ... 'I can't believe that this has happened,' especially for this book, which had such a fraught publication history in Canada," recalled the Calgary native, who released her debut novel, "The Second Life of Samuel Tyne," in 2004.

"It's nice to see that this has been the outcome."

The novel's complicated history involves Key Porter Books, which was slated to publish "Half-Blood Blues" here in February before it announced in January that it was suspending operations.

A few months later, Edugyan signed with Thomas Allen & Son, which released "Half-Blood Blues" in Canada on Saturday. The book is already in reprint in England, where it hit shelves in June.

Edugyan said she's especially curious to see what the reaction to the novel will be when it arrives in Germany in November.

After all, Germany is where the characters first came together as the Hot-Time Swingers jazz band and is where their harrowing and at times humorous journey begins.

Sidney (Sid) Griffiths, an African American upright bass player, is the novel's narrator. Hieronymous (Hiero) Falk is the group's prodigious Afro-German trumpeter, who gains the attention of Louis Armstrong. Chip Jones is the brash African American drummer who is Sid's longtime pal. That band also includes a wealthy German clarinet player and a Jewish pianist.

The novel goes back and forth in time as it runs down the characters' lives.

The first chapter is set in Paris in 1940, when Hiero goes missing after getting arrested by Nazi troops in a bar.

Edugyan, whose parents are from Ghana, said the impetus for the novel was her residencies around Europe, mostly in Germany, about five years ago.

"I started thinking about the place of black people in German society and how far back did that go," said Edugyan, who has degrees from Johns Hopkins University and the University of Victoria.

As she read books on black people who lived through the Third Reich, Edugyan became intrigued with stories of African American jazz musicians who went to Berlin for the cabaret scene at the time. She was also fascinated with the history of children of German women and African colonial soldiers around that time.

Edugyan also consulted jazz dictionaries to craft the characters' distinct dialogue.

She made Sid the narrator rather than Hiero, she said, because it seemed more respectful, given that she's not Afro-German.

"(Hiero's) kind of this enigma at the heart of the book, which I really, really liked, because he's this prodigy, and prodigy seems unknowable," said Edugyan.

"So to just watch things happen to him from the outside is, to me, very telling, especially about society."