Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published May 2014
320 pages
Genre: Historical Fiction
Publication Information
What is real and what is an illusion? Can you trust your memory to provide an accurate record of what has happened in your life?
The Confabulist is a clever, entertaining, and suspenseful narrative that weaves together the rise and fall of world-famous Harry Houdini with the surprising story of Martin Strauss, an unknown man whose fate seems forever tied to the magician's in a way that will ultimately startle and amaze. It is at once a vivid portrait of an alluring, late-nineteenth/early-twentieth-century world; a front-row seat to a world-class magic show; and an unexpected love story. In the end, the book is a kind of magic trick in itself: there is much more to Martin than meets the eye.
Historically rich and ingeniously told, this is a novel about magic and memory, truth and illusion, and the ways that love, hope, grief, and imagination can - for better or for worse - alter what we perceive and believe.
"Starred Review. A brilliant novel, and one that virtually demands multiple readings to pick up all the subtleties (especially concerning the end of the book, and enough said about that)." - Booklist
"Galloway makes this notion somewhat believable, but the basic premise of this stylish but convoluted novel - Houdini's survival - remains difficult to accept." - Publishers Weekly
"An entertaining fictional reflection on the 20th century's most famous magician." - Kirkus
"Galloway, who is fast emerging as one of our finest young writers, has produced another novel to linger over, read and re-read, in order to glean all that it has to offer." - Kevin Baker, author of The Big Crowd
This information about The Confabulist was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo © Lee Henderson
Steven Galloway is the author of Finnie Walsh, Ascension, The Cellist of Sarajevo, and The Confabulist. He has won the Borders Original Voice Award, the OLA Evergreen Award, and the George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in Literature, and been nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Richard & Judy Book of the Year Award, the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, the Canadian Booksellers Association Fiction Award, and the Amazon.ca/Books in Canada First Novel Award. His work has been published in over thirty countries and optioned for film.
He teaches creative writing at the University of British Columbia and lives in New Westminster with his two daughters.
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