Alix Ohlin

INSIDE is now available in paperback in the US, from Vintage Contemporaries.  Click here to buy.

Here is an interview with Gabriele Wilson, the talented designer who came up with the beautiful jacket image for INSIDE (and made her own snowglobe!).  The link includes images of alternate versions of the cover.

Since it's fun to see your book wearing alternate outfits, here are some links to the Dutch jacket and the German.  I'll post links to other foreign editions as they appear.

Lastly, here's an essay I recently published at the Los Angeles Review of Books, called "Reader, You Married Him: Male Writers, Female Readers, and the Marriage Plot."

Inside was named a top book of the year by the Globe and Mail, Amazon.ca, San Francisco Chronicle, and Quill & Quire. 

The editors at iTunes Canada chose it as the novel of the year, writing: "As this brilliant work opens, a therapist in Montreal comes across a failed suicide attempt, launching a narrative that weaves together three moving, irresistible stories." 

I wrote about some of my own favourite books of the year for the Millions, here.

Many thanks to everyone who supported, wrote about, read and shared my work this year.

INSIDE is #7 on the Canadian fiction bestseller list this week.

Huge, huge thanks to Heather Reisman for choosing INSIDE as a "Heather's Pick" at Indigo stores: 

http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/Inside-Alix-Ohlin/9781770892064-item.html?ikwid=alix+ohlin&ikwsec=Books

Here is a picture of INSIDE on the table at the Chapters-Indigo in my hometown of Pointe Claire:

(Photo courtesy of my mom.)

Inside is on the short lists for both the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and the Scotiabank Giller Prize.

The Writers' Trust jury citation describes Inside as "intricate, involving and inspiring ... Deep and emotional, Ohlin's novel shows us how coincidental and complicated life can be.  A truly rewarding journey."

The jury for the Giller Prize (Gary Shteyngart, Anna Porter, and Roddy Doyle) notes that "The novel jumps between decades, locations and characters with a precision that makes Ohlin's hard work seem effortless...It is beautifully crafted and beautifully told."

Please check the "Reviews" section of this site for links to coverage of the books from the Boston Globe, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Globe and Mail, and other places.

Also, my essay on Daphne Du Maurier--whose brilliant novella "Don't Look Now" inspired "The Stepmother's Story," one of the pieces in Signs and Wonders--is up today at the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Here are a few links to pieces I've written about the recent books:

I wrote about my childhood synesthesia and the way I see my books in color for the Small Demons blog.

For Powell's, I wrote about the geography of Inside.

I also made a musical playlist for Inside at the excellent Largehearted Boy site.

And at Everyday Ebook, I wrote about why I think Signs and Wonders is a collection of love stories.

I'm grateful to the book bloggers and reviewers who have already taken the time to read and write about my books.  Thank you!

At Bella's Bookshelves, Steph VanderMeulen describes Inside as a novel to be savoured.

Claire Howorth's review of Signs and Wonders for The Daily calls the stories "trim, perfectly wrapped packages."

At From Inner to Outer, reviewer Brett Josef Grubisic says Inside is terrific. 

I’ve only been to Edinburgh once, for a conference, and I roamed around for days, attended some weird and fabulous plays as part of the Fringe Festival, and nothing bad befell me, unlike my character Anne in Inside.

Edinburgh lives in my imagination mostly as the setting for one of my favorite books of all time, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark, a novel whose indelible characters and spiraling narrative energy have inspired me for years.

It is also bracingly funny and smart.  If you haven’t read it yet, you should do so immediately.  There is no other character in literature like Miss Jean Brodie, the Scottish teacher in her prime, and no writer as fearlessly caustic as Spark.

“Give me a girl at an impressionable age and she is mine for life,” says Miss Jean Brodie, a testimony borne out both by her effect on the novel’s characters, and on me, as a reader.

The book’s formal inventiveness (it races around in time) taught me a lot about structure.  Even more important, at various dark moments I have reread it and it never fails to make me laugh.  “Who opened the window?” Miss Jean Brodie asks.  “Six inches is perfectly adequate. More is vulgar.”

If we were all as opinionated and frank as Miss Jean Brodie, the world might be even more terrifying than it already is, but surely it would also be more entertaining.  As she says to a student: “Allow me, in conclusion, to congratulate you warmly upon your sexual intercourse, as well as your singing.”

This is a picture that Theodora Ziolkowski, daughter of my friend and colleague Lee Upton, took on her own trip to Edinburgh:

Thanks to Theodora for permission to include the photo here.

Book Page says of Inside: "Consistently surprising, often devastating as the protagonists find themselves unable to achieve closeness with others—to share what’s on the inside—it’s a memorable read."

Marie-Claire says of Signs and Wonders: "Unputdownable...crisp, focused, lovely, and lasting...Ohlin's characters are so genuine you'll be reminded of people you know, love, and hate.  For better or for worse, you may even see yourself in the pages."

Of all the places I wrote about in Inside, Rwanda is the only one I’ve never seen for myself.  I was (and am) very nervous about including it, for that reason. 

In the book, a Canadian aid worker struggles to recover from his experiences working in Rwanda in 1994.  Like many people, I’d read Philip Gourevitch’s heartbreaking We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, as well as other accounts and news stories, and watched the PBS Frontline special Ghosts of Rwanda on the ten-year anniversary of the genocide.  But the section of Inside dealing with Rwanda came specifically out of listening to interviews with U.N. peacekeeper Roméo Dallaire. 

Dallaire was shattered by the events surrounding the Rwandan genocide—both the tragedy itself and the political gamesmanship that prevented the U.N. forces from acting decisively to avert it.  He could not get over his own guilt over this.  He went to therapy, he tried to commit suicide, he brooded and cried and drank.  He has gone on to write and speak extensively about Rwanda, but he will forever, it seems to me, be haunted by it.

I strongly recommend Dallaire’s book Shake Hands with the Devil.  You can also listen to an interview with him here.

Inside is about attempts to rescue people who are in trouble.  What drives us to try to help others? What does it mean to be the witness to other people’s trauma?  How does it affect those on either side of the equation?  Including this section that touches on the Rwandan genocide was, for me, part of writing about that theme on a larger scale.

For the section of Inside that takes place in Nunavut, I drew in part on my own travels there long ago. When I was fifteen I flew to Iqaluit with a group of Girl Guides from my hometown of Montreal.  We were on our way to Pangnirtung, an Inuit hamlet on the coast of Baffin Island, from which we would begin hiking through Auyuittuq National Park.  Baffin Island is the northernmost place I’ve ever been, and Auyuittuq—in Inuktitut, the language of Canada’s Inuit people, it means “the land that never melts”—is austerely beautiful, a rocky, treeless landscape bordered with jagged, swooping mountain peaks.  The sky rarely darkened—it was July—and as we hiked, we saw that the grey rocks were enlivened with bright splashes of tiny Arctic wildflowers: daisies, poppies, fireweed.  

Halfway through the trip we came across a troupe of Australian Boy Scouts setting up a base camp for a six week sojourn in the park.  We were carrying all our food and tents on our backs, essentials only.  Hiking for hours each day, we were starving.  I’m not sure which had us more agog, the handsome Boy Scouts or their well-stocked food barrels.  I remember us flirting with them shamelessly and aggressively until they relented and gave us some of their Mars bars, which we devoured quickly, without guilt.

For all my memories of the Arctic—the beauty of the national park; the almost-total early morning hush of Iqaluit, my breath smoking cold in July; the soapstone carving of a bird I bought in Pangnirtung and still have—what has stuck with me the longest is the moment of return.  The trip helped me begin to understand, in some small way, the enormous geographical expanse of Canada, a country whose people cluster around its southern border but whose land stretches massively to the north.  I remember very clearly the flight back from Iqaluit to Montreal.  As the plane landed I looked out the window and noticed, for the first time, how hemmed in we were by trees.  Everything seemed very green and very close, and I felt both comforted and a little claustrophobic.  The sky was hazy, the world cluttered with buildings and traffic.  It takes being away from your own landscape to feel it, to understand how it has shaped you, how physical and tangible is your experience of home.

*this post is not really about life in a Northern town; I just wanted to quote The Dream Academy:

I have a new story, "Casino," up today at Guernica Magazine.  Click here to read.

This is the Chalet on Mount Royal, in Montreal, where I grew up.  In the opening scenes of my novel Inside, a woman cross country skiing not far from the chalet finds a man in trouble, and her desire to save him—more than anything, from himself—changes her life forever.

I went to high school down the street from Mount Royal. The park was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, who also designed Central Park, and it showcases his trademark aesthetic, which emphasized natural features over the artificiality of, say, European-style flower gardens.  Its trails and meadows are constructed in harmony with the landscape, working with the hilly topography instead of trying to flatten it out; there are both wide-open spaces and secluded nooks.

In the fall I ran cross country in the park.  On weekends I’d sometimes meet friends near the illuminated cross at the top of the mountain, or survey the city’s lights and bridges from one of the lookout points.  The park was somehow both naturally beautiful and totally urban.  All different kinds of people used it, in all different ways.  You could buy drugs there (not saying I did this!), or join a drum circle, or jog or hike or just gaze down at the city, feeling like you owned it.

In the park, as everywhere in Montreal, you’d hear many languages—English and French, of course, and often the mid-sentence commingling of the two; but also Vietnamese, Chinese, Italian, Greek.  More than any other place I know Montreal is a city where linguistic dexterity is on display.  The politics of language in Quebec are intensely fraught; but there is also a beautiful fluidity and worldliness to this place where words and the culture they arise from are so prized.   

Two of the characters in my novel are therapists, and one thing that intrigues me about talk therapy is that it is a form of healing that takes place in large part through language, through the telling and re-fashioning of stories, and the idea that this exchange can help people strikes me as both amazing and true.

Interestingly, Olmsted thought of Mount Royal itself as a form of therapy; in his first report to the Mount Royal Park Commissioners, he wrote of the power of nature “to eliminate conditions which tend to nervous depression or irritability.”

“Charming natural scenery,” he told the commission, “acts in a more directly remedial way to enable men to better resist the harmful influences of ordinary town life, and recover what they lose from them.  It is thus, in medical phrase, a prophylactic and therapeutic agent of vital value…and to the mass of people it is practically available only through such means as are provided through parks.”*

Back in high school, of course, hanging around on the mountain, I didn’t think about any of that. Like my character Grace, I was a skier, though not a good one.  I was on the cross country ski team but not athletic in general and when we competed I usually faked a cramp or stomach flu halfway through the race so as not to have to finish.  While the others strode purposefully along, I’d drift off the course, loving the sudden quiet of the snowy woods.  I’d lean my poles against a tree and daydream, making up stories about people, the city, the mountain, the world.

*I found this in A.L. Murray, “Frederick Law Olmsted and the Design of Mount Royal Park, Montreal,” Journal of The Society of Architectural Historians 26:3 (Oct 1967), pp. 163-171.

Thank you to Raven Books in Dublin for this nice write-up of Inside: http://ramblings.ravenbooks.ie/2012/01/something-different.html

Here's a video of me reading "Vigo Park" from Signs and Wonders at ASU's Desert Nights, Rising Stars conference:

Publishers Weekly calls Signs and Wonders a "winning" collection.  Click here to read the full review: http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0307743794