Martin Sloane

Critical Praise

"Tension between one's lifework forms the center of Michael Redhill's striking first novel...In the end, whatever I might tell you about what I think the novel means is irrelevant. Its truths reveal themselves slowly and according to what each reader brings to the story. It keeps changing like something alive. About the novel, like the boxes and love, it matters less what you think than how it makes you feel. So I'll tell you that 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."
-Bliss Broyard, New York Times Book Review

"The second half of Martin Sloane lyrically depicts Jolene’s decade-long attempt to track Martin down. . . [Redhill’s changes of scenery] knowingly convey how difficult it can be to fully know a lover. . . attention to such emotional truths. . . a book of high polish that, like the work of Redhill's fellow Canadians Dennis Bock and Michael Ondaatje, values texture over story. In the end, however, this narrative inertia has a point: It aptly re-creates the way romantic passion can be difficult, sometimes impossible, to relinquish."
-John Freeman, Time Out New York

"Redhill's prose has the prismatic quality of one of his protagonist's boxed-in landscapes. While the book itself is often unobtrusive and deceptively simple, it triggers in the reader a series of resonating images and emotions. This is a meditation on memory and strangeness, on the difficulty of human communication, even with those we hold dearest. It is a work to be puzzled over and savored."
-Kevin Greenberg, Book magazine

"What Michael Redhill's entrancing novel depicts is itself a kind of Joseph Cornell box: a plangently charged little world out of which his narrator painfully finds her way... Martin Sloane, essentially, is a journey along which its protagonist learns to detach herself from moments of the past that, like those boxes, contain an imprisoning beauty... His art is the equivalent: a beauty that conveys aching emotion and is contained in boxes... This first part of Jolene's story is light, young, with touches of rueful comedy and hints of something starker. It is only one panel in the author's Cornell box. He has written a novel of simultaneities, advances and flashbacks... The links are there to Martin's later distances and boxes, but here is a writer for whom linking is less important than making what is linked unique and memorably human... The mystery begets further mysteries during a car ride across Ireland. They are resolved, approximately — Mr. Redhill is too interesting a writer for complete resolutions — in an extraordinarily strange and affecting conclusion... Some of the novel's finest passages are Jolene's thoughts on keeping memory at bay and moving on."
-Richard Eder, New York Times

"Michael Redhill's first novel, Martin Sloane, is a haunted art gallery, not of paintings but of boxes. Based on the unusual creations of New York artist Joseph Cornell, it tells the story of collage artist Martin Sloane, who arranges the bric-a-brac of junk and thrift stores to create strange, almost surreal dioramas. . . Redhill's book, not unlike the later stories of Henry James, is a work of fiction in which thoughts speak more loudly than words and the distinction between art and life is the story's real mystery."
-Brad Vice, San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

"First-time novelist Michael Redhill has crafted an unnerving mystery-of-sorts. . . This is a book peppered with real surprises, and for a debut novel, it's gripping, writerly one. . . the plot's many wide turns make for a pleasant ride. And in a refreshing break from the genre, the crux of this mystery is the intellectual dilemma of every artist on the introverted side."
-Tiffany Lee-Youngren, San Diego Union-Tribune

"A memorable and satisfying read, Redhill's book leaves the reader with a child's sense of nostalgia and a sympathy for the impasses of adulthood."
-Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Redhill presents a remarkable first novel—his powerful language and mastery of character is thrilling, and the plot...never becomes cliche or predictable. A fantastic exploration into the guises and complexities of art, love, and memory."
-Booklist (starred review)

"Impressively written. . . From a promising young Canadian writer. . . [it] says everything quite well."
-Kirkus Reviews

"Mild and beautiful on the surface, Martin Sloane has explosives buried quietly in its emotional landscape.... The pacing of Redhill's writing is marvelous.... His language is masterful.... Martin Sloane is a subtle and 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 & Mail

"A powerful story.... For a first novel, even one polished through a dozen drafts over ten years, Martin Sloane is remarkably assured."
-Brian Bethune, Maclean's

"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 a deeply moving first novel that reveals human truths with grace and humor. Michael Redhill's portrait of the artist and the magnetic influence on those around him is profound and full of affection. It is a book of constant surprises."
-Michael Ondaatje, author of THE ENGLISH PATIENT and ANIL'S GHOST

"Michael Redhill has created a thoughtful, quietly engrossing novel whose truths are all the more powerful for the delicacy with which they are revealed."
-Myla Goldberg, author of BEE SEASON

"Michael Redhill is a writer of considerable humanity and insight. His first novel is a highly crafted and subtly disturbing delight."
-A.L. Kennedy, author of ON BULLFIGHTING, ORIGINAL BLISS, and EVERYTHING YOU NEED

"MARTIN SLOANE sails right along, buoyed by graceful plotting and many surprises - but it also unnerves, which makes it a very satisfying novel indeed. Loyalty and loss come under close scrutiny here, and no reader will walk away from this story without feeling the excitement that arrives when assumptions get boldly rocked. This one's a keeper."
-Martha Cooley, author of THE ARCHIVIST

"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 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