‘To the Lighthouse” A review of Christy Ann Conlin’s new novel, The Memento, by Allan Pero, Toronto Review of Books, October 26, 2016
Christy Ann Conlin, the author of Heave, has published her second novel, and the result is nothing short of dazzling… The final chapters take place roughly ten years later, and in some respects, become an uncanny reworking of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. The pressure of history, the thrust of memory, force the novel’s pace to speed up accordingly…The dizzying speed of revelation produces, in its masterly way, the effect of what T. S. Eliot calls “genuine poetry”—one that “communicates before it is understood.”
128 Sterling Podcast Interview With Noah Richler, October 20, 2016
Episode Two: “How Many People do You Have to Know.”
Wherein we discuss The Memento, the writing life in a rural locale, women and sex, and sense of place. And bonus: I do a short reading from the book, a dark sexy reading…
Origin Stories: Christy Ann Conlin by Sarah Sawler, Atlantic Books Today, October/November 2016
“I realized for all the travels I’ve done, the most exotic place in the world to me still was the mountain and the valley where I came from,” says Conlin.
The Next Chapter with Shelagh Rogers, CBC Radio
The Memento Interview on The Next Chapter with Shelagh Rogers
The Globe and Mail
The Memento is a classic spine-tingler, centering on a haunted house and children hovering between evil and innocence, power and vulnerability. As in Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger, the decaying mansion is used to represent shared guilt and a dying way of life. And, like that great coming-of-age Gothic, Truman Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms, Conlin’s novel lingers on relationships between children and servants, children and their (often absent) parents, and elderly relatives – all within the span of one sultry, sordid summer…”
Trilby Kent, The Globe and Mail Click here for more…
Toronto Star
“The Memento is a novel of the uncanny, drawing together a coming of age story with elements of ghost stories, haunted houses, family curses and folk tales. It’s a dizzying feat… a masterful accomplishment from a powerful writer.” Robert Wiersema, The Toronto Star
Click here for more.
For the full and wonderful National Post discussion of The Memento in the Afterword Reading Society Feature…click here.
The Coast
“Expertly weaving gothic elements, maritime superstition and the lingering effects of grief, The Memento is an eerie return to form — ceaselessly tense until the last page.”
Lindsay Gloade-Raining Bird, Click here for full profile
