Advance Praise for Martin John

“The novel all your favourite novelists will be reading.”
—The Globe & Mail

Possessed of a bitingly acerbic voice influenced by Beckett, Joyce, and O’Casey, Schofield offers a sardonic, funny, and stylistically innovative breath of fresh air to a literature that too often feels starved for oxygen.—Quill & Quire

“This is literature serving its most essential function: illuminating the darkest recesses; dragging the unspoken and suppressed to the foreground . . . throwing light across the blackest of humanity’s vistas. This is writing at its most fearless: visceral and searing, yet textured and nuanced; the darkest of comedy and the deepest of insight.”—Donal Ryan, author of The Thing About December and The Spinning Heart

“Martin John is singular in contemporary literature. [The novel takes] a deeply imagined, almost operatic view of marginal characters trapped in the absurdities and perversions of systems: mental, social, and familial. Anakana uses devastatingly specific prose that conversely portrays the poetry of human suffering. Moving, profoundly human, insightful, and darkly humorous.”
—Thalia Field, author of Bird Lovers, Backyard

“You might hold your breath while reading this novel. The story transgresses the body with or without our permission, and illuminates important ideas we ordinarily look away from. And yet it is now, more than ever, that we need to reread the body.”
—Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Chronology of Water