Michelle Berry

Michelle Berry is the author of three books of short stories, How to Get There from Here, Margaret Lives in the Basement, and I Still Don't Even Know You, as well as six novels, What We All Want, Blur, Blind Crescent,[1] Interference, This Book Will Not Save Your Life and The Prisoner and the Chaplain. In October 2016, Berry opened a bookstore, The Hunter Street Bookstore, in Peterborough, Ontario.[2]

Critical reception

The Globe and Mail reviewed Berry's 2011 novel This Book Will Not Save Your Life favorably, with reviewer Moira Dann called it a "a well-executed story that goes from quirky (intriguing off-centre family; blackly funny, even) to murky (unfettered, unrelenting dysfunction and despair, peopled by hard-to-like characters), while keeping the reader wondering what's going to happen next...The story is well-paced (even with the necessary repetition of its Rashomon-style narrative) and the characters are unforgettable."[3]

Berry's 2014 novel Interference received mixed reviews. Writing in the National Post, Emily M. Keeler said, "Berry's better than most at weaving in and out of the perspectives of so many characters without losing steam; she manages her cast with considerable skill, and her approach makes it all the more enjoyable to piece together the goings on in fictional Parkville. Interference is like a short drive through a strange suburb, that rich domain of beautiful, frustrated youth and workaday adulthood; Berry's Parkville is a place many Canadians will recognize, but altered just slightly enough through her comic noir lens to let a little of the wit, and the fear, bleed out of the novel and into your head."[4] By contrast in The Globe and Mail, reviewer Emily Donaldson suggested "Berry's characters are so thinly developed it's difficult to imagine them stripped of their banal problems."[1]

Berry's sixth novel, The Prisoner and the Chaplain, was published in September 2017.[5] "The terror and disgust she works up in the novel's closing passages have staying power beyond the contrivances of its plot," asserts a review in Quill & Quire.[6]

References
  1. Donaldson, Emily (August 8, 2014). "Michelle Berry's Interference: Dysfunction junction". The Globe and Mail. Retrieved 2017-05-22.
  2. "Michelle Berry's next chapter". The Globe and Mail. December 16, 2016. Retrieved 2016-12-30.
  3. Dann, Moira (February 2, 2011). "This Book Will Not Save Your Life, by Michelle Berry". The Globe and Mail. Retrieved 22 May 2017.
  4. "Interference, by Michelle Berry: Review". National Post. August 1, 2014. Retrieved 2016-12-30.
  5. "Michelle Berry - Kingston WritersFest". kingstonwritersfest.ca. Retrieved 10 September 2017.
  6. "The Prisoner and the Chaplain". quillandquire.com. 19 September 2017. Retrieved 13 January 2019.
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