We are excited to share a roundup of spectacular press and praise for THERE IS NO BLUE by Martha Baillie!
THERE IS NO BLUE (published with Coach House Books in North America and Granta in the UK.) is Martha Baillie’s richly layered response to her mother’s passing, her father’s life, and her sister’s suicide is an exploration of how the body, the rooms we inhabit, and our languages offer the psyche a home, if only for a time.
Since its release in October 2023 it has been garnering some rave reviews and recognition! Here are just a few of them:
- Chosen as one of the Globe and Mail’s 62 Books to Read this Fall 2023: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books/article-fall-books-preview-62-books-to-get-ready-for-the-cozy-season/#memoir
- One of CBC Books picks for the top Canadian nonfiction of the year for 2023: https://bit.ly/3uiTcFS
- Included in the Globe and Mail’s list of the 100 Best Books of 2023: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books/article-globe-100-best-books-2023/
- Received a rave review in The Guardian. “[Baillie] knows she’ll never find out why a shared childhood should have had such different outcomes; the only truth she arrives at will be variable and of her own making. Still, the ‘disobedient tale’ she tells is tough, tender and compelling.” – Blake Morrison, The Guardian. Read the full review here: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/jan/10/there-is-no-blue-martha-baillie-review-a-tough-and-tender-family-memoir
- Nothing but praise from The Sunday Times. “There is No Blue is a study in the tyranny of fragility. . . It’s strangely mesmerizing, also disturbing. It’s a book about memory–whose memory counts–but it’s also a book about art.” – Christina Patterson, The Sunday Times. Click here to read the full review: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/there-is-no-blue-by-martha-baillie-j3ww66vqs
- “Baillie’s memoir in essays, There Is No Blue, emerges from a desire to collapse [the] distance between sister and sister.” – Rachel Gerry, Literary Review of Canada said in her review of THERE IS NO BLUE. Read the full piece here: https://reviewcanada.ca/magazine/2023/12/familial-fragments/
About THERE IS NO BLUE:
Three essays, three deaths. The first is the death of the author’s mother, a protracted disappearance, leaving space for thoughtfulness and ritual: the washing of her body, the making of a death mask. The second considers the author’s father, his remoteness, his charm, a lacuna at the centre of the family even before his death, earlier than her mother’s. And then, the shocking death of the author’s sister, a visual artist and writer living with a diagnosis of schizophrenia, who writes three reasons to die on her bedroom wall and then takes her life.
Martha Baillie lives and works in Toronto. Her novel The Incident Report was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and is being made into a feature film to be released in 2023. The Search for Heinrich Schlögel was an Oprah editors’ pick. Sister Language, co-written with her late sister, Christina Baillie, was a 2020 Trillium Award finalist. Martha’s non-fiction can be found in Brick: A Literary Journal. Her poetry has appeared in the Iowa Review.
Martha is represented by Samantha Haywood.