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.
Finalist for the 2020 Writers' Trust Fiction Prize
A 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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