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PRAISE FOR MARTIN JOHN
“Deploying some serious literary gumption, Schofield’s frequently hilarious, and distinctly modernist, linguistic games are always gainfully employed in the uneasy, indelicate task of placing her reader nose to nose with the humanity of a sex offender — and a sex offender’s mother.”—Eimear McBride, The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice)
“[A] frenetic, risk-taking novel … deliberately cryptic and bleakly funny.”—The New Yorker
“It’s hard not to think of Lolita while reading Anakana Schofield’s Martin John… In the cadenced, hypnotic style of Gertrude Stein, Ms. Schofield renders [Martin John’s] consciousness through a kind of staccato anti-poetry … The result is a grotesquely memorable character pursued through his mazes of routines and obsessions and rationalizations.”—Wall Street Journal
“An important and brilliantly unconventional work.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“The power of [Martin John] comes from its unpredictability … [Schofield] walks the tricky line between creating empathy for a character without lessening the reader’s understanding of the horror of his actions.”—Tobias Carroll, Electric Literature
“Martin John is a profound, innovative, and poignant meditation on identity.”—David Gutowski, Largehearted Boy
“Funny, distressing, and complicated.”—The Guardian
“Martin John is … a comic tour de force … Many writers have brazenly wandered into the minefield of mental illness, but few with Schofield’s peculiar decency and candour in not only depicting Martin John’s scheming turmoil, but also the bewildered righteousness of those surrounding him.”—Eileen Battersby, The Irish Times
“Dazzling … With its discomfiting portraiture … brain-puzzle of a storytelling technique, and utter assurance, Martin John easily matches the tremendous promise of Malarky, Schofield’s debut.”—Maclean’s
“Brilliant … While Schofield has digested all of postmodernism’s tics and tricks, her writing is fundamentally empathetic, and the various interventions feel like necessary attempts to render the unspeakable, rather than as flashy mystifications of a straightforward narrative. In its social critique, Martin John has much in common with the brilliant journalism of Ann Brocklehurst and Ed Tubb, but as an avant-garde novelist, Schofield is in a class unto herself.”
—David B. Hobbs, The Globe & Mail
“Exhilarating … The weird and recursive prose makes the language startlingly vivid, and Martin John’s fractured narrative perspective is positively adrenal … Schofield’s ability to get us jacked up from exquisitely written and deeply troubling jokes about a middle-aged public masturbator makes [her] one of the highest-flying and funniest working today.”
—Emily Keeler, The National Post
“The novel all your favourite novelists will be reading.”
—Mark Medley, The Globe & Mail
“Language aside, innovation aside, what makes this book so compelling is the utterly convincing portrait of its troubled and troubling protagonist, Martin John. You might not like Martin John or want to run into him on the subway, but he will stay with you long after you have put the novel down, not least because of those uncomfortable bits of him that you’ll recognize in yourself.”—Nino Ricci, CBC Books
“Martin John is the best novel I have read in years: long after reading it I feel that I am still reading it, being read by it.”—Geist
“Darkly funny, saddening, and compassionate … [Martin John] shows readers how postmodern writing techniques can make some small sort of sense out of the seemingly insensible.”—Foreword Reviews
“Martin John, Schofield’s second novel, performs the paranoiac drama between identity, knowledge, recognition, and desire.”—Full Stop
“Virtuosic … [Schofield] has crafted a wholly believable journey into the mind of a deeply warped young man … An astoundingly focused piece of writing.”
—The Georgia Straight
“Schofield’s trademark Celtic-Gothic sensibility is evident once again as Martin John explores madness, dark comedy, isolation and sexual compulsion.”
—Toronto Star
“Fearless … Pick [up this book] if you are enthralled by what the novel with its variable and elastic form can do as Schofield pushes the boundaries in careful calibrations of narrative structure and language that bites.”
—The Vancouver Sun
“[A] stylistically audacious second novel.”
—Steven Beattie, Quill & Quire
“Effective and captivating … The author’s tone in these segments is coolly detached and nearly journalistic, generating in the reader a sensation of voyeurism that is profoundly unsettling and in keeping with the experience of reading Martin John.”
—Shawn Syms, Quill & Quire
“Profane, strange, hilarious, and necessary, Martin John is a beguiling triumph.”
—Patrick deWitt, author of The Sisters Brothers
“This is a very moving and terrific book.”
—Daniel Handler, author of We Are Pirates
“Written with all the electrifying humour of her award-winning debut Malarky, exhibiting a startling grasp of the loops and obsessions of a molester’s mind, Martin John is a testament to Canadian Irish author’s Anakana Schofield’s skill and audacity—and stands as a brilliant, Beckettian exploration of a man’s long slide into deviancy.”—The Irish Post
“This is dangerous writing … Schofield is giving voice to a marginalized perspective, one that is rarely heard or heard this clearly … But this is why Martin John is necessary: Schofield is not a moralist, and her interest in human behaviour—honourable or deplorable—allows angles of light into neglected spaces of the human condition … Brave and sensitive.”
—The Winnipeg Free Press
“Conveyed in hilarious, deadpan beautiful prose … Schofield’s first achievement is to burrow into Martin John’s rackety mind. Her second crucial achievement is to turn this unsettling apprehension into a necessary, extraordinary act of empathy.”
—Alison Gillmor, The Winnipeg Review
“Schofield gives us a complex and unrelenting portrait of a brain that will not co-operate.”—Edmonton Journal
“Spectacularly written … You’ve never read anything like it.”
—NOW Toronto
“Brilliant … From Martin John’s uncanny repetitions and ellipses, Schofield forges beautiful and thrilling prose-poetry. The atmosphere of her language is stunningly distinctive.”—Literary Review
“A grown-up tale of how blighted lives carry on . . . fizz[ing] with surface humour.”—The Spectator
“A bold novel … Schofield shows her skill through precise, singular and forceful prose.”—The Sunday Telegraph, 5/5 Stars
“Necessary and urgent … Martin John roars to life; chaotic, compelling and disjointed from the very first page.”—The Sunday Business Post
“Martin John is not interested in being an easy book. Not easy on its readers, and not easy on its title character. … [but] what makes this book so necessary is the way it makes us see what we’d rather not see.”—PRISM
“Martin John is a darkly comic story about a deeply troubled man … an intelligent, deeply thought-provoking—and brave—novel.”—Reading Matters
“Humorous … fast-paced … for a novel about a sexual deviant, Martin John is positively breezy.”
—Pickle Me This
“This is literature serving its most essential function: illuminating the darkest recesses; dragging the unspoken and suppressed to the foreground of our consciousness; 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, combined in a manner unique to Anakana Schofield.”
—Donal Ryan, author of The Thing About December and The Spinning Heart
“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
“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
“Anakana Schofield’s first book, Malarky, was one of my favourite books last year. This one is different; it is darker, creepier. But it is every bit as clever and bold.”
—Consumed by Ink
PRAISE FOR MALARKY
“Caustic, funny and moving.”
—Emma Donoghue
“Electrically alive.”
—Colum McCann
“A fine book.”
—Margaret Atwood
“Quirky, racous, and utterly unconventional.”
—Reader’s Digest
“Potent and fresh … In certain moments, we are not so far from Beckett’s Molloy … Our Woman comes close to enlivening not only the political and the personal but also the human.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Delightfully offbeat … Schofield offers a deft — and altogether welcome — comic touch … One of the season’s best reads.”
—The National Post
