Reviews & News
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Giller Prize Longlist for the Incident Report
Martha Baillie’s Incident Report is chosen for the Scotiabank Giller Prize longlist; one of 12 Canadian authors up for the prize.
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Canada Also Reads: The Longlist; nominates The Incident Report. This new ‘longlist‘ is The Afterword’s shadow competition to the CBC’s yearly Canada Reads Competition.
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The Incident Report chosen for The Globe And Mail’s 12th annual pick of the 100 best and most influential books of the year.
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Praise for The Incident Report
“A beautiful derangement. Martha Bailie’s novel references everything from Satie’s Variations to the Brothers Grimm. Along the way, it offers readers the utter virtues of getting completely lost.”
“Baillie is a subtle portraitist and creates an engaging heroine with rich psychological nuance.”
“Baillie’s unsettling dreamscape … seems to speak to a host of unsaid violations… But all is not darkness. The Incident Report is also very funny.”
The Globe & Mail - see full review
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“Baillie has written a book that gives new life to the Canadian novel.”
Geist
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“You won’t enter a Toronto public library in the same way after reading Martha Baillie’s haunting new novel…. Read this in one or two sittings so its gallery of colourful characters feels as real as people you pass on the street every day.”
Now Magazie
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“Baillie’s novel contains real tenderness, rendered in beautiful prose with compelling restraint.”
Quill & Quire
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“Part of living in a city is dealing with the extreme public realm and density created and the “crazy” people that populate its edges. When everyone piles around a table on a sweaty summer evening and begins to share stories about the “guy swearing to himself on the bus this morning” or “the woman who walked into the coffee shop today petting an imaginary dog” they vocalize those events for a number of reasons: fear, humor, pure disbelief.” …
Agora Review - Aaron Tucker - see full review
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… “Memory is like a deck of cards, Kristjana Gunnars once wrote, each card reacting to the one that came before, and so does Baillie’s novel, working and winding its own way through the reader.” …
rob mclennan’s blog - see full review
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Praise for The Shape I Gave You:
“[T]he story pleasantly seduces you. . . . There are so many strengths . . . [The Shape I Gave You] does what the best novels do: it not only takes you deep into the characters and their beliefs and preoccupations, it makes you reflect on the choices you made in your own life.”
–Winnipeg Free Press
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“[W]e put down the book commending Baillie not only for the poetic grace of her prose, but for her masterful delivery of an exquisite plot twist. . . . The novel’s precise, multi-faceted construction includes astute commentary upon the nature of letter-writing and of literature . . . This is a novel to savour rather than devour. Essentially monogamous people plagued by a singular adulterous temptation of the nostalgic kind will want to send Baillie a thank you note, for understanding.”
–The Gazette (Montreal)
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“Haunting…. What would you do in such a situation, with no one to unburden your heart to? The best novels pose such compelling moral questions, and this is a very good novel. . . . A literary style that occasionally echoes both Anne Michaels and Elizabeth Smart. . . . Full of finely wrought detail. . . . These are grown-up thoughts and this is a grown-up, rather European-feeling
novel.”
–Bronwyn Drainie, Quill & Quire
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“The Shape I Gave You is a richly evocative story about Ulrike, a musician trapped in the recurring themes of her father’s adultery. She is forced to exhume dead loves and lives in this sophisticated novel about how the past haunts the present.”
–Sandra Martin, Elle Canada
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“[An] old-fashioned quality . . . gives Baillie’s work its charm and elegance. Her stories have weight and value history. . . . Baillie’s made a strong statement on the pain of grief and the unexpected way in which compassion can be sown. She’s also shown that with each new novel her voice becomes stronger.”
–NOW (Toronto)
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Praise for Madame Balashovskaya’s Apartment:
“What I would give to be invited to a soiree in Madame Balashovskaya’s apartment…..Baillie gives richness to these lives in a book filled with beautiful writing.”
–The Globe and Mail (Laura Robinson)
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“….the portrait of Eugenie is a heart stopping evocation of a life’s slow fade…..Baillie conveys both the beauty and the beastliness of the rain-soaked metropolis, its café culture and the pointed ambitions of its intelligentsia, in what turns out to be a nugget of a novel.”
–Now (Toronto), Susan G. Cole
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Praise for My Sister Esther:
“….impressive for its language, superb characterization and almost quiet desperation of day to day living… Baillie gives us a sincere, unpretentious novel that impresses, even haunts.”
–Rob McLennan, Ottawa X Press
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