Michael Redhill

Jean Mason has a doppelganger. At least, that's what people tell her. Jean's curiosity quickly gets the better of her, and she visits the market, but sees no one who looks like her. The next day, she goes back to look again. With the aid of a small army of locals, she expands her surveillance. A peculiar collection of drug addicts, scam artists, philanthropists, philosophers and vagrants are eager to contribute to Jean's investigation. But when some of them start disappearing, it becomes apparent that her alleged double has a sinister agenda.

A Novel

Bellevue Square

A widow and her daughter's fianc ̌take a hotel room overlooking a Toronto excavation site awaiting the discovery of the physical evidence that will vindicate her husband's ridiculed belief that a sunken ship from 1856 is now buried under a landfill site.

Consolation

*Winner of the 2017 Scotiabank Giller Prize* A darkly comic literary thriller about a woman who fears for her sanity--and then her life--when she learns that her doppelganger has appeared in a local park. Jean Mason has a doppelganger. She's never seen her, but others swear they have. Apparently, her identical twin hangs out in Kensington Market, where she sometimes buys churros and drags an empty shopping cart down the streets, like she's looking for something to put in it. Jean's a grown woman with a husband and two kids, as well as a thriving bookstore in downtown Toronto, and she doesn't rattle easily--not like she used to. But after two customers insist they've seen her double, Jean decides to investigate. She begins at the crossroads of Kensington Market: a city park called Bellevue Square. Although she sees no one who looks like her, it only takes a few visits to the park for her to become obsessed with the possibility of encountering her twin in the flesh. With the aid of a small army of locals who hang around in the park, she expands her surveillance, making it known she'll pay for information or sightings. A peculiar collection of drug addicts, scam artists, philanthropists, philosophers and vagrants--the regulars of Bellevue Square--are eager to contribute to Jean's investigation. But when some of them start disappearing, she fears her alleged double has a sinister agenda. Unless Jean stops her, she and everyone she cares about will face a fate much stranger than death.

Goodness

A classic adventure story set in historic Toronto—with a dash of humour and a lot of heart Dashiel Woolf is ecstatic when famous magician Bloom the Beguiler brings him onstage during a special performance to mark the eighty-fifth anniversary of Harry Houdini’s death. But a century-old trick invented by Bloom’s grandfather goes inexplicably wrong—sending Dash back to 1926. Wandering the historic streets of Toronto, he barely recognizes his city but with the help of his new friend, Walt, he hatches a plan to invent the trick that will transport him home. In doing so, they just might prevent the Great Houdini from taking part in the event that ended his life, possibly changing history forever.

Saving Houdini

Ross Manson

Building Jerusalem takes place on New Year's Eve, 1899, in the Grange, one of the grandest houses in Toronto. Now the home of the celebrated writer Goldwyn Smith, it is to be the scene of a New Year's party for four auspicious guests: Karl Pearson, the German statistician, Augusta Stowe-Gullen, a medical doctor and suffragette, Silas rand, a missionary among the Nova Scotian Micmac Indians, and Adelaide Hoodless, a domestic scientist. But when their host is delayed, the four guests find themselves instead with his beautiful niece, Alice, who devises a series of songs and games to help her uncle's guests pass the time more easily. Little do they all know what suprises lie in wait as the new century creeps closer, and the stroke of midnight arrives with a terrible and beautiful revelation.

Building Jerusalem

In 1984, Jolene Iolas, a student in upstate New York, encounters Martin Sloane's art while visiting a Toronto gallery. Flush with the confidence of youth, she strikes up a correspondence with the older artist, and eventually the two become lovers. Introduced to a constancy of love she has never known, Jolene relaxes into the rituals of being someone's other half. She learns Martin's story and cherishes it as her own. He becomes a fixture in her life, a star in her sky. And then, he vanishes. There is no hint of his fate, no chain of cause to be followed. Over a long fall, the shock slowly hardening into fact, Jolene sheds her life, losing everything, including her oldest friend, Molly, to inexpressible grief. Ten years pass, Jolene slowly learns to stop trying to make sense of it all. But before she can fully return to life, the opportunity to confront a ghost arises. Word has come from Molly, of all people, that someone named Sloane has been exhibiting artworks identical to Martin's in Irish galleries. Jolene travels to Dublin, where she reluctantly reconnects with Molly and together, they find themselves lost in a jumble of pasts as they try to piece together what happened to Martin Sloane. An exquisitely crafted novel, Martin Sloane is about the mysteries of love and art, the weight of history, and what it means to bear memory for the missing and the dead.

Martin Sloane

Light-Crossing is an electric field of love and attraction, where invisible currents conjoin, cross, and charge the atmosphere with possibility and latent tension. Whether discussing the love between father and infant son, a man and the woman he spots from afar, or a husband and wife, the poems pulse with eroticism and the sweet accretions of memory.This collection is luminescent, radiating an easy beauty that guides us to what is lasting and true.

Poems

Light-crossing

Redhill conjures up many unexpected twists in ten richly textured stories that range from the darkness of family silences to the hilarity of people caught in their own snares. With his unflinching attention to emotional detail, Redhill proves once again to be "a writer of considerable humanity and insight" (A.L. Kennedy).

Stories

Fidelity

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 Ondaatje

Esta Spalding

Linda Spalding

An Anchor Books Original Seventy-four distinguished writers tell personal tales of books loved and lost–great books overlooked, under-read, out of print, stolen, scorned, extinct, or otherwise out of commission. Compiled by the editors of Brick: A Literary Magazine, Lost Classics is a reader’s delight: an intriguing and entertaining collection of eulogies for lost books. As the editors have written in a joint introduction to the book, “being lovers of books, we’ve pulled a scent of these absences behind us our whole reading lives, telling people about books that exist only on our own shelves, or even just in our own memory.” Anyone who has ever been changed by a book will find kindred spirits in the pages of Lost Classics. Each of the editors has contributed a lost book essay to this collection, including Michael Ondaatje on Sri Lankan filmmaker Tissa Abeysekara’s Bringing Tony Home, a novella about a mutual era of childhood. Also included are Margaret Atwood on sex and death in the scandalous Doctor Glas, first published in Sweden in 1905; Russell Banks on the off-beat travelogue Too Late to Turn Back by Barbara Greene–the “slightly ditzy” cousin of Graham; Bill Richardson on a children’s book for adults by Russell Hoban; Ronald Wright on William Golding’s Pincher Martin; Caryl Phillips on Michael Mac Liammoir’s account of his experiences on the set of Orson Welles’s Othello, and much, much more.

Michael Redhill

Books

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