Martin John
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Finalist for the 2015 Giller Prize
Among The National Post's Top 5 Books of 2015
Among The Toronto Star's Top 5 Fiction Books of 2015
Among Largehearted Boy's Favourite Novels of 2015
One of Quill & Quire’s Books of the Year, 2015
Among The Edmonton Journal's Top 5 Books of 2015
A 49th Shelf Book of the Year, 2015
Among NOW Toronto's Top 10 Books of 2015
Martin John’s mam says that she is glad he is done with it. But is Martin John done with it? He says he wants it to stop, his mother wants it to stop, we all want it to stop. But is it really what Martin John wants? He had it in his mind to do it and he did it. Harm was done when he did it. Harm would continue to be done. Who will stop Martin John? Will you stop him? Should she stop him?
From Anakana Schofield, the brilliant author of the bestselling Malarky, comes a darkly comic novel circuiting through the mind, motivations and preoccupations of a character many women have experienced but few have understood quite so well. The result confirms Schofield as one of the bravest and most innovative authors at work in English today.
Anakana Schofield is an Irish-born writer, who won the Amazon.ca First Novel Award and the Debut-Litzer Prize for Fiction in 2013 for her debut novel Malarky.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Martin John has a problem that could land him behind bars: he has a tendency to expose himself and masturbate in public. To counter this, his life is a series of carefully regimented circuits and lists of things to avoid, such as public transportation and words that begin with "P." His mother frets over every facet of his existence, spending her days watching television clips of criminals and wondering about mothers who've "failed" as she feels she has. Her sanity and Martin's survival depend on his ability to remain focused on his job and to leave nothing in his life open to possibility. Schofield (Malarky) eschews an excess of detail to terrific effect. The novel's harsh, sometimes broken language, paired with a minimum of punctuation, crafts a deliberate and effective sense of confusion, as if entering a mind or minds in the midst of great turmoil. Often the novel reads like an anthropological report filtered through a literary lens; the details of Martin's life and crimes are stacked as if documenting a human card tower barely capable of remaining upright. This is an important and brilliantly unconventional work, offering a glimpse into a mind few can ever, or would ever want to, fully understand.
