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by Martha Baillie
Martha Baillie's hypnotic novel follows Heinrich Schlögel from Germany to Canada, where he sets out on a two-week hike into the isolated interior of Baffin Island. His journey quickly becomes surreal; he experiences strange encounters and inexplicable visions as shards of Arctic history emerge from the shifting landscape. When he returns from his hike, he discovers that, though he has not aged, thirty years have passed.
Narrated by an unnamed archivist who is attempting to piece together the truth of Heinrich's life, The Search for Heinrich Schlögel dances between reality and dream, asking us to consider not only our role in imagining the future into existence but also the consequences of our past choices.
"Starred Review. Baillie delivers a work of magical realism that captures the experience of postcolonial guilt... and gives voice to a silenced past. The temporal shift works perfectly, producing an effect of ghostly haunting alongside childlike wonder." - Publishers Weekly
"The Search for Heinrich Schlögel is utterly distinctive, a fictional biography that drifts so imperceptibly into dream that it's impossible to tell where the reality of it ends and the fantasy begins. " - Kevin Brockmeier, author of The Illumination
Fluid as light itself, animated by startling imagery, vivid and peculiar characters, The Search for Heinrich Schlögel is a hymn to brooding memory, the enduring need to inhabit story, and a haunting insistence upon endless possibilities within possibility. That is to say, hope." - Gina Ochsner, author of The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight
"Martha Baillie's extraordinary The Search for Heinrich Schlögel is not quite like any other book I've read. It invites us on a hallucinatory journey to the Arctic and through time." - Catherine Bush, author of The Rules of Engagement and Accusation
This information about The Search for Heinrich Schlögel 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.
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