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Start giftingThe Beguiling
Narrator
Amanda Cordner
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Length
7 hours 38 minutes
Language
English
Bookseller recommendation
“Lucy is thrown by the tragic and mysterious death of her beloved cousin, Zoltan, with whom she shared a love for old movies. His murder resembles that of the 1971 film The Beguiled, thus the book’s title. Following his death, Lucy is haunted, then enchanted, by a series of confessions by strangers who approach her out of the blue. As she silently ponders the increasingly shocking stories—which she considers with pitch black humor—Lucy contemplates motherhood, culture, religion (its limitations, its possibilities), life, death, the concept of time, memory and its failings. Each confession is its own vignette—separated by the cawing of crows, the tolling of a clock tower, and percussive clapping rather than by an Act of Contrition. A fascinating picture of humanity narrated flawlessly by Amanda Cordner.”
— Mary • Raven Book Store
Bookseller recommendation
“After the death of her cousin Zoltan under bizarre circumstances, Lucy becomes a magnet for confessions. One after another, in a variety of situations, a parade of characters, including plants and a pug, tell her their darkest secrets. And just as she hears and relates their stories, she also shares her own, making the reader her confessor. Dark humor, guilt, sorrow, tragedy, and wit weave through this clever frame story to its perfect ending that I didn’t expect. Not only is this an excellent story, but the sound effects dividing sections in the audio version add a perfect, somewhat ominous tone to this journey through the secrets and psyches of some most interesting characters.”
— Nancy • Raven Book Store
An electrifying debut novel from the Giller Prize-shortlisted author of Better Living Through Plastic Explosives that takes readers for a wild ride with urban-gothic flair and delectably wicked humour.
Lucy is a lapsed-Catholic whose adolescent pretensions to sainthood are unexpectedly revived.
It all starts when her cousin Zoltan, in hospital following a bizarre incident at a party, offers her a disturbing deathbed confession. Lucy's grief takes an unusual turn: Zoltan's death appears to have turned her into a magnet for the unshriven. Lucy is transformed into a self-described "flesh-and-blood Wailing Wall" as strangers unburden themselves to her. She becomes addicted to the dark stories, finds herself jonesing for hit after hit.
As the confessions pile up, Lucy begins to wonder if Zoltan's death was as random and unscripted as it appeared. She clutches at alarming synchronicities, seeks meaning in the stories of strangers. Why do the stories seem connected to each other or eerily echo elements of her life? Could it be because Lucy has her own transgressions to acknowledge? And then there is that stubbornly resurfacing past, like a tell-tale ribbon of hair snagged on a fish hook.
With ruthless wit and dizzying energy, The Beguiling explores blessings and curses, sainthood and sin, mortality and guilt in all its guises. Weaving together tales of errant mothers, vengeful plants, canine wisdom, and murder, it lays bare the flesh and blood sacrifices people are willing to make to get what they think they desire.
Zsuzsi Gartner is the Scotiabank Giller Prize-shortlisted author of two widely acclaimed story collections, Better Living Through Plastic Explosives and All the Anxious Girls on Earth. Her fiction has been widely anthologized, broadcast on CBC and NPR, and won numerous prizes, including a 2016 National Magazine Award. She is also the editor of the award-winning fiction anthology Darwin's Bastards: Astounding Tales from Tomorrow. Zsuzsi has been on the faculty of UBC's Creating Writing MFA program and many of the Banff Centre's writing programs, and is the founder and director of Writers Adventure Camp in Whistler, BC. Excerpts from The Beguiling, her debut novel, have appeared in The Walrus, SubTerrin, and Maisonneuve. She lives in Vancouver.
Reviews
Finalist for the 2020 Writers' Trust Fiction PrizeA Globe and Mail Best Book of 2020
One of CBC’s Best Canadian Fiction of 2020
“A symphony of a novel—multi-voiced and kaleidoscopic. Gartner’s latest is a funny and darkly dazzling meditation on storytelling, the power of confession and its profound relationship to freedom, love and grief.”
—Mona Awad, author of Bunny and 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl
“Every sentence in Zsuzsi Gartner’s debut novel The Beguiling is a masterclass in the art of fiction. . . . It’s a series of bravura literary acts, and one could be impressed solely by the stylistic and structural elements. The Beguiling is a sucker punch of a book. . . . You have to experience it: it’s apt to be one of the finest books you read this year.”
—Toronto Star
“The writing is exquisite, with sentences that pack punches and are thick with references. . . . This is a story told nowhere near straight. It twists, it twirls, it arcs, it changes tack. It keeps you on your toes.”
—The Globe and Mail
“[With] rich prose and a loving embrace of the crazy coincidences of life . . . Gartner packs [The Beguiling] with cultural references high and low, which both exhilarate and add texture and context. . . . [E]bullient and delightful.”
—Publishers Weekly
“When it comes to describing Gartner’s writing, I become uncomfortably close to genuflection. . . . Zany, smart, and adroitly droll, The Beguiling’s most beguiling aspect is how one person—Zsuzsi Gartner—has the gall to be so singularly talented. Gartner has a maddening amount of talent, with not a drop wasted. One can only hope to absorb some of it through osmosis.”
—The Ormsby Review
“I haven't read a novel like this in some time. . . . With its balance of entertainment and literary craft, The Beguiling reminded me, various moments, of novels that have left me similarly exhilarated and staggered, as though I’ve just fallen in love with words all over again—Sterne’s Tristam Shandy, Phychon’s The Crying of Lot 49, Saragamo’s Gospel According to Jesus Christ. Like them, Gartner’s compels us to the joys and gravitas of reading.”
—Peter Babiak, SubTerrain Magazine
“The Beguiling challenges perceptive readers to read between the lines, to let go of conventional ideas of a story with its beginning, middle, and end. Gartner’s writing, frenetic and unyielding, simply dazzles in this novel, as do her efforts to portray the tragic struggle of a fraught figure—the mother who can’t or won’t love—with frankness and humanity.”
—Chicago Review of Books
“What is interesting is how comfortable Gartner’s fertile imagination and the novel’s Catholic rituals and iconography seem to be with one another. Gothic tropes . . . abound in a work that is also highly moral and piercingly intelligent.”
—Quill & Quire
“Hard to believe that this multiaward-winning fiction writer could be releasing a debut, but it’s true. Beloved and critically acclaimed for her short stories, including the Giller-nominated collection Better Living Through Plastic Explosives, Gartner delivers a wild ride of a debut novel. . .”
—The Globe and Mail
“The gothic flair, dark humour and quirky characters promise a good read.”
—Toronto Star
“[A]n exquisitely crafted, profoundly readable novel about the human compulsion to seek absolution in strangers, a page-turner so compelling, so inventive, so weirdly weird, readers will feel like they’ve been to a party that leaves them wondering at the genius of the host who pulled it off. . . . [The Beguiling is] a book as full of imagination as heart . . . this is Gartner at her best.”
—Writers' Trust Jury
“[The Beguiling] disrupts convention and further entrenches Gartner outside the tradition of staid, comfortable Canadian fiction.”
—Quill & Quire
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