Martin Sloane

A stunning first novel, a huge critical success and a bestseller in Canada, which explores the power of memory, love and art.

It is rare to read a novel that pulses with such pleasure that you don't want it to end, but this is what Redhill's debut delivers

A deeply moving first novel... profound and full of affection. It is a book of constant surprises.

Beautifully structured, and shards of cleverness and humour run through it... hard to put down

Reading "Martin Sloane" made me feel melancholic, hopeful, amused, energized, enlightened, unnerved, touched, and finally grateful that occasionally a writer comes along who gets real life just right.

Redhill [has] a gift for studied lyricism, a complex kind of emotional intelligence and, most of all, a poet's understanding of the workings of time... a powerful meditation on the implications of memory and the vacancies opened up by the loss of love... Redhill paces this sad and oblique detective story with great heart and delicacy.

Redhill's mild prose is dense with powerful emotional insights. Like Martin's art, it inspires a feeling of stillness and calm, of looking down on things from above; while underneath rest layer upon layer of meaning, prompting reflection on the novel's images and understandings long after the last page is reached.

A first novel with a rich centre... not a word to spare or an image too many.

Often intriguing... Jolene's youthful crassness and belated recognit ion or everything she lost are sharply and movingly evoked.

Michael Redhill is a poet and playwright. He lives in Toronto. Martin Sloane is his first novel.

In 1984, Jolene Iolas, a student in upstate New York, encounters Martin Sloane's work while visiting a Toronto gallery.  She strikes up a correspondence with the older artist, and eventually they become lovers. And then, without warning, without a word, he vanishes. There is no hint of his fate, no chain of cause and effect to be followed. Over the following months, Jolene sheds her life, losing everything, including her oldest friend, Molly, to her grief. Ten years pass, and Jolene begins to live with Martin's disappearance. But then the opportunity to confront her ghost arises. Word comes from, of all people, Molly, that someone named Sloane has been exhibiting in Irish galleries. Jolene travels to Dublin, where she is reluctantly reunited with her old friend. Together, the two women become lost in a jumble of pasts as they try to piece together what happened to Martin Sloane. Seamlessly crafted and beautifully written, Martin Sloane evokes the mysteries of love and art, the weight of history, and what it means to bear memory for the missing and the dead.

Michael Redhill

Richly textured ... sumptuously wrought ... The tone is one of sweet melancholy, and the ebbs and flows of loving relationships are acutely rendered. Not only this, but the evocation of [the] era is irresistible

Complex, poetic, heartfelt and most beautifully written

Absorbing ... Redhill has artistic sense and nerve

It is 1856, Toronto. Unable to make a living in the New World from his trade, English apothecary J.G. Hallam takes up the new science of photography, and embarks on a grand project to document the bleak young city. But returning from an exhibition of these images in England, Hallam's ship is lost in a violent storm on Lake Ontario - and the strongbox holding the photographs is lost.<br/>
<br/>
A century and a half later, and the shoreline of the harbour has shifted dramatically. Professor David Hollis speculates that the sunken ship containing this important historical record lies in the landfill where the city's new Union Arena is to be built. But his findings are met only with howls of derision from his colleagues.<br/>
<br/>
Three months later, Hollis is dead - and his grieving widow, Marianne, embarks on a furtive, unsettling quest to vindicate her husband. From her hotel room overlooking the excavation site where the arena is to stand, she watches and waits for a piece of the past to reappear that might alleviate the anguish of these civic and private vanishings...

Michael Redhill

Praise for Consolation

Richly textured ... sumptuously wrought ... The tone is one of sweet melancholy, and the ebbs and flows of loving relationships are acutely rendered. Not only this, but the evocation of [the] era is irresistible

Complex, poetic, heartfelt and most beautifully written

Absorbing ... Redhill has artistic sense and nerve

Richly textured ... sumptuously wrought ... The tone is one of sweet melancholy, and the ebbs and flows of loving relationships are acutely rendered. Not only this, but the evocation of [the] era is irresistible

Complex, poetic, heartfelt and most beautifully written

Absorbing ... Redhill has artistic sense and nerve

Richly textured ... sumptuously wrought ... The tone is one of sweet melancholy, and the ebbs and flows of loving relationships are acutely rendered. Not only this, but the evocation of [the] era is irresistible

Complex, poetic, heartfelt and most beautifully written

Absorbing ... Redhill has artistic sense and nerve

Books by Michael Redhill

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