Tonight at the Gladstone Hotel Ballroom...

Martha Baillie - The Shape I Gave You (Knopf Canada)

Author Martha Baillie launches her new novel with jazz by Lightstone, Katz & Quarrington, songs by vocalist Theo Heras accompanied by Cindy Fairbank, art exhibits by Colm MacCool & Vid Ingelevics, and an interview with Marc Glassman.

Gladstone Hotel Ballroom, 1214 Queen St W, TorontoTues, Mar 21, 7-10pm (doors 7pm), free

Join us as author Martha Baillie celebrates the publication of her new novel, The Shape I Gave You (Knopf Canada).

The Shape I Gave You (Knopf Canada) - The night before she leaves to give a recital in another city, Ulrike Huguenot, a young pianist, arrives at her Berlin apartment to find an unexpected and unwelcome letter. It is from Beatrice Mann, a Canadian sculptor, a friend of her father, Gustave, and also, Ulrike believes, his lover. What could this woman possibly have to say to her? And why now, seven years after her father’s death? “I am writing to you because my daughter has died,” begins Beatrice’s extraordinary letter of confession. Her only child, Ines, has been killed at the age of eighteen, and Beatrice has closed herself in her Toronto studio. Unable to speak openly with her grieving husband, Isaac, she turns to Ulrike, a young woman she barely knows. While Beatrice retells and possibly reshapes the past, Isaac sets out on a journey of his own. As Ulrike reads about Beatrice’s life and Gustave’s role in it, she reluctantly revisits the world of her own memories and starts to see her present in a different light. In The Shape I Gave You, acclaimed novelist and poet Martha Baillie explores the complex relationships between parents and children, men and women, to create a novel of spare elegance that gives piercing insight into the nature of confession and how we choose who to ask for absolution.

Martha Baillie was born in Toronto. Her poems have been widely published in journals such as Descant, Prairie Fire and the Antigonish Review. Her first novel, My Sister Esther, was published by Turnstone Press in 1995. Her second, Madame Balashovskaya’s Apartment, was published by Turnstone Press in 1999 and then published in Germany and Hungary. After stints in Edinburgh, Paris and Asia, Baillie returned to Toronto where she lives with her family.