Extraordinary praise for Michael Redhill’s bestselling, award-winning first novel

Martin Sloane

“Michael Redhill has achieved with this novel what Martin Sloane strives for in his boxes — a precision of emotions, life in miniature with all its details and complexity. Redhill’s language is exacting and carefully chosen as he creates for the reader a composite and contradictory world that is at once haunting and beautiful. The book is in its own way a replica of the boxes, capturing the human condition where perfection eludes us as love does. This is a stunning debut, life-size and moving.”

— Mary Morris, author of The Night Sky and Acts of God

“I read a superb novel yesterday, the kind that makes you lousy company for hours afterwards — because you want to mull over its details rather than be social, because you prefer its world to the one that, at dinner, you suddenly find yourself contending with.... Martin Sloane makes you realize just how thin and fleeting most of what passes for good fiction is.”

— Noah Richler, National Post

“Martin Sloane is remarkably assured.... Redhill has created a stunningly polished and powerful book.”

— Brian Bethune, Maclean’s

“Redhill’s language is masterful.... Mild and beautiful on the surface, Martin Sloane has explosives buried quietly in its emotional landscape.... An intimate novel that warns us how gray and empty life becomes when we settle for bad copies, for unsatisfying imitations of real things.”

— Beverly Daurio, Globe and Mail

“The scenes of Martin Sloane’s childhood are so beautifully detailed and psychologically compelling.... It is a childhood as achingly convincing as it is beautifully written — not a word too spare or an image too many. It is distant in time but vivid and lovely, as if we watch Martin’s past through a fourth glass wall, a tiny jeweled theatre of enigma and loss.”

— Will Aitken, Gazette

“Martin Sloane is such a good novel it is hard to believe it is Michael Redhill’s first. Lyrical, funny, moving, and writerly in the most engaging way, it deserves a wide readership.”

— Wayne Johnston, author of The Colony of Unrequited Dreams

“Michael Redhill has a keen eye for physical and emotional detail, and he’s housed his mystery in an engaging narrative structure.... There is much to recommend here.... The latter sections that describe Sloane’s childhood are ravishing.”

— Bill Richardson, Quill & Quire

“Redhill’s turns of phrase often combine solid, well-hewn familiarity with leavening flashes of wit or beauty.... In the latter scenes, with young Martin Sloane growing up in Dublin, those twelve drafts pay off. Redhill’s found the sweet spot on his racket, and hits ace after ace.”

— Annabel Lyon, Vancouver Sun

“Michael Redhill’s first novel seems destined to become a classic, one of those books handed from friend to friend. …With this luminous, wonderful book, he highlights the complexities of human relationships in profound and unexpected ways.”

— Books in Canada

“Redhill shines.... Martin Sloane is a complex, introspective tale that puts love at odds with the power of place, and explores how those competing pulls upon our hearts define us and our choices.... Redhill has created a worthy piece of art.”

— Audrey Hensen, Hamilton Spectator