The Memento - Softcover

"A dizzying feat. . . . A masterful accomplishment from a powerful writer." --Toronto Star

"The Memento is a classic spinetingler. . . . Conlin has an excellent eye for the grotesque and a light comic touch, and her writing often sparkles. . . . She has the courage to show us a real monster. . . . It's refreshing to encounter something as horrifically visceral as the nightmarish creature here. . . . The distinction between madness and malice is increasingly blurred, to powerful effect." --The Globe and Mail

"Lovely and sinister, The Memento is a gorgeous unveiling of the relentless darkness that awaits beneath the pristine, orderly beauties we so painstakingly impose." --Lynn Coady, author of Scotiabank Giller Prize-winning Hellgoing

"Conlin has built a dense, intricate world. . . . Weaving economic, feminist, spiritual and family threads across sharply realized characters, dipping in and out of genre and time in a gripping way that sneaks up on you." --The Coast (Halifax)

"Trust in Christy Ann Conlin. Follow the mythic thread she has expertly woven through this rich labyrinth of a novel and you will be transported. This is the work of a master storyteller operating at the height of her craft." --Alexander MacLeod, author of Light Lifting

"In this exuberant novel, Christy Ann Conlin offers us a grab bag of gothic delights--a creaking groaning mansion, a precocious 12th-born twelve-year-old, tea parties with the dead and an unnerving number of fleeting darting 'somethings' only glimpsed in the corner of your eye. Wildly imaginative." --Caroline Adderson, author of Ellen in Pieces

"The Memento is as much a lush atmospheric ghost story as it is a meditation on memory and grief. There is a subtle Turn of the Screw sinisterness, an eeriness, that lingers long after you've put the book down." --Michelle Berry, author of Blind Crescent

"Through the intriguing narrator of The Memento, Conlin performs a kind of literary necromancy, leading the reader through this vivid, compelling, eerie tale--of the power of blood, the pain of reflection, and the ways in which we are all haunted by our pasts--so intimately it is as if she is walking us through the baroque rooms and grounds of tragic, haunted Petal's End." --Jacqueline Baker, author of The Broken Hours

"The Memento is a strange, verdant, alluring and haunted novel of secrets harboured like seeping illnesses, of children and misremembering, of landscape, of richest truths as they dare erupt in creative acts. I read it breakneck, in an altered state, and have placed it on the bookshelf--respectfully so as not to disturb the hobgobblies--between Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House and Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping." --Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, author of All the Broken Things

CHRISTY ANN CONLIN's acclaimed and bestselling first novel, Heave (2002), was a Globe and Mail "Top 100" book, a finalist for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award in 2003 and was shortlisted for the Thomas H. Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award and the Dartmouth Book Award. Heave was also longlisted for the 2011 CBC Canada Reads Novels of the Decade. Her short fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies and literary journals including Best Canadian Stories. Conlin also hosted the popular 2012 CBC summer radio series Fear Itself. The Memento is her first novel in fourteen years. Conlin teaches at the University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies online Creative Writing program. She lives in Wolfville, Nova Scotia.