At the Full and Change of the Moon chronicles a family story with no pretensions to completeness or continuity, but rather one which ‘bursts forth in snatches and fragments’. Rather than exploring and exposing the shortcomings of colonial historiography in order to demand a place for enslaved peoples and their descendants within an expanded version of that history, the novel highlights the continuities between past colonial violence, including the violence contained within the gaps of the colonial archive, and the violences and silences of contemporary social and economic relations. Brand's novel starts from the margins of the colonial archives, but it suggests that colonial historiography, while still powerful, is neither an adequate recourse for the injustices of the black Atlantic past nor a vehicle for the diasporic longings of black Atlantic subjects today. Rather than ‘yearning for a different past’, in the sense of erasing the shame and suffering of slavery, the novel charts multiple desires for a new mode of relating to the past and thus new ways of being in the present and alternative futures for black diasporic subjects. Containing only fragments of each character's life story and thus working against the ‘narrative coherence’ of the temporality of a normative life, this is a queer family history in which the lives sketched in the fragments rarely follow the prescribed sequences of national heteronormativity. Refusing the logic which allows ‘heterosexuality […] to masquerade […] as History itself’, the text offers a diasporic queerness which results in a representation both of ‘modes of being […] that refuse the consequential promise of “history”’ and of the transformational challenge posed by, and transformational potential promised by the narration of those lives to that history.

The novel's insistence that memory shapes, and indeed confounds, the past and future—that slavery means that ‘every turning stood still […] every stillness turned to motion […] what she was about to do she had imagined done already, like a memory’—suggests first the ways in which memory might work to ‘displace the developmental temporality that constitutes this [individual] subject as wilful and self-possessed’, or a colonial hierarchy which accords such self-possessed subjectivity a superior position. It also exposes and renegotiates contemporary black Atlantic historicity, in the sense developed by Michel-Rolph Trouillot.