Martha Baillie was born in Toronto. After stints in Edinburgh, Paris and Asia, Baillie returned to Toronto where she lives with her family. 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.

Novels:

The Shape I Gave You
(Knopf Canada, 2006)

Madame Balashovskaya's Apartment
(Turnstone Press, Canada, 1999, Ebersbach, Germany, 2001, Kossuth, Hungary, 2002)

My Sister Esther
(Turnstone Press, Canada, 1995)

Poetry:

The Unreeling Line and Regretfully Yours
(Prairie Fire, 2002)

July in Toronto
(Fiddlehead, 2001)

Moths
(Descant, 2001)

Six Poems of Distance and Desire
(The Antigonish Review, Nova Scotia, 1991)

Short Fiction:

Madame B's 100th Birthday
(Geist, Vancouver, # 34, 1999)

The Well
(Blood and Aphorisms, Toronto, 1994)

The Lake
(Blood and Aphorisms, Toronto, 1993)

A Day in the Bath
(Blood and Aphorisms, Toronto, 1992)

Book Reviews:

• For Resource Links, Vancouver, 1995-1997:
  "A Winter's Tale" by Ian Wallace
  Feb. 1997
  "My Arctic 1 2 3" by Michael Kusugak
  Dec. 1996
  "Have You Seen bugs" by J. Oppenheim
  Oct. 1996
  "Bibi and the Bull" by Carol Vaage
  Jun. 1996
  "Princess Prunella and the Purple Peanut"
  by Margaret Atwood
  Feb. 1996
  "One Grey Mouse" by Katherine Burton
  Dec. 1995
  "Ladybug Garden" by Celia Godkin
  Oct. 1995
   


• "The Doctor's House" by Cary Fagan
  (Books in Canada, Toronto, Oct 1996)
  
  

Work on offer:

The Shape I Gave You

This extraordinary new novel by an accomplished poet and novelist is a beautifully written love story about the spaces that divide us and the people we imagine each other to be.

The night before she leaves to give a recital in another city, Ulrike Huguenot, a young pianist, arrives at her Berlin apartment planning to spend a relaxing evening there. Instead, she finds, stuffed in her mailbox, 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’m 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 she retells, and possibly reshapes, the past – her obsession with the exacting and complex Gustave, and her relationship with her elusive, now vanished, daughter – 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 an altered 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.

World Rights excluding: Knopf Canada (Spring 2006)

Praise:

For The Shape I Gave You

…Writing as therapy is hardly a new idea, but Baillie elevates the technique to include an array of topics beyond the nature of love and sorrow to family secrets, politics and art…. Personal history takes place against public events...Baillie investigates how characters can miss what is in front of them, and more important, she explores how individuals and families construct identity through what is revealed and what is hidden.…Baillie's style is articulate, elegantly nuanced and replete with allusions to artists and thinkers…The counterpoint of pleasure and pain is moulded by memory -- and Baillie does an excellent job of showing how memory creates the past and the present.... Why people love whom they do is a mystery, and certainly Beatrice's love for Gustave appears quite fanciful at times. But to her, it's real and it matters. And that's what counts. Baillie's examination of emotion in The Shape I Gave You is unfaltering in its deep compassion.”
     - Globe & Mail

“Baillie's work (has)...charm and elegance. Her stories have weight and value history....” and “...Baillie's made a strong statement on the pain of grief and the unexpected way in which compassion can be sown.”
     - Susan G. Cole NOW Magazine

“Her latest [novel] does what the best novels do: it not only takes you deep into the characters and their beliefs and preoccupations, it makes you reflect on the choices you made in your own life.”
     - The Winnipeg Free Press

“Martha Baillie, a poet at heart, has risked basing her new novel, The Shape I Gave You, on the ancient tradition of the dangerous liaison fuelled by the written word......Baillie doesn't settle for the facile, nor the vengeful....we put down the book commending (her) not only for the poetic grace of her prose, but for her masterful delivery of an exquisite plot twist......The novel's precise, multi-faceted construction includes astute commentary upon the nature of letter writing and of literature, and how the former can transmute into the latter......This is a novel to savour.”
     - The Montreal Gazette

“Baillie's tight narrative manages to bring complex feelings into shape without surrendering to self-pity or grief. Both central characters, and many of the secondary ones, are searching for an ability to engage with the world, with life, and with those they purportedly love. Fundamentally they are learning to trust again. Beatrice's act of desperate need, and her act of confession is transformed into a selflessness that ultimately leads to joy.”
     - The Sunday Star

“In a literary style that occasionally echoes both Anne Michaels and Elizabeth Smart, but is much more tightly disciplined than either, Baillie explores the meaning of her title as it applies to all her characters, but especially to Beatrice and Gustave.”
     - Quill & Quire

“Set in Berlin, a city with a horrendously freighted history, The Shape I Gave You is a richly evocative story about Ulrike, a musician trapped in the recurring themes of her father's adultery. She is forced to exhume dead loves and lives in this sophisticated novel about how the past haunts the present.”
     - Sandra Martin Elle Canada March 06 (Top 3 Picks of Spring 06)

“In The Shape I Gave You, Martha Baillie leads us on a journey through love and loss, writing and obsession, grief and desire, in a style both heartfelt and elegant. Her brilliantly evoked terrain is not only Germany and Ontario, but also the ever-changing landscape of the human heart..”
     - Mark Abley

For Madame Balashovskaya's Apartment

“What I would give to be invited to a soiree in Madame Balashovskaya's Apartment.... Baillie gives richness to these lives in a book filled with beautiful writing. I didn't read Madame Balashovskaya while sitting in the Patisserie Viennese where Liuba and Barbara so often met, or from the balcony overlooking the Seine, where Anna felt sorry for herself. Nevertheless I was in Paris.”
     - The Globe & Mail

“...a story of romance, creative desire and emotional regret...the portrait of Eugenie is a heart stopping evocation of a life's slow fade...Baillie conveys both the beauty and the beastliness of the rain-soaked metropolis, its cafe culture and the pointed ambitions of its intelligentsia, in what turns out to be a nugget of a novel.”
     - Now Magazine