Why read There Is No Blue?

Book cover of There Is No Blue

Book description

THE GLOBE AND MAIL: BOOKS TO READ IN FALL 2023

Martha Baillie's richly layered response to her mother's passing, her father's life, and her sister's suicide is an exploration of how the body, the rooms we inhabit, and our languages offer the psyche a home, if only for a time.

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Why read it?

1 author picked There Is No Blue as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Mark Abley

Author

The Toronto novelist Martha Baillie has written about her family before – in the guise of fiction, that is.

Now, in a memoir, she strips away the fictional covering and lays her family bare: her artistic, sometimes remote mother; her tender-hearted, professorial father; and her brilliantly gifted sister, Christina, who battled mental illness for decades before taking her own life in the family home in 2019.

Baillie faces up to her own partial responsibility for her sister’s death. But she does so in graceful, chiseled prose, as elegant as it is unflinching.

There Is No Blue shows that elegies,…

From Mark's 3 favorite reads in 2023.