Search for Heinrich Schlogel A Novel

When Heinrich at last returns to the isolated town of Pangnirtung, where his hike began, he discovers that thirty years have vanished. Though he has not aged, the rest of the world has sped forward to 2010. He fears that if he attempts to explain his bizarre predicament hell either be disbelieved and labeled crazy or put on display as a scientific phenomenon, that hell become an object of public curiosity, his life echoing the fate of a small group of Inuit who, in the late nineteenth century, were taken from Labrador and exhibited in the Berlin Zoo.

Heinrich must somehow make his his way to Toronto, where he believes his sister might be living. Meantime, befriended by an Inuit teenager, Vicky, and her grandmother, Sarah, he struggles to adapt to his sudden arrival in the twenty-first century and in the contemporary Inuit community where he finds himself stranded.

This hypnotic novel is narrated by an unnamed archivist who is attempting to piece together the truth of Heinrich Schlogels life, searching on eBay for fragments of his journals, his correspondence with his sister, and photographs from his childhood. Heinrichs story, as it unfolds, in todays disappearing North, asks us to consider our role in imagining the future into existence while considering the consequences of our past choices.

The Search for Heinrich Schlogel dances between reality and fantasy. Brimming with the creativity behind David Mitchells masterpiece Cloud Atlas in a far north setting, The Search for Heinrich Schlogel is a sophisticated story with magical underpinnings.

“Capacious, capricious, mischievous, The Search for Heinrich Schlögel moves like a quantum experiment, defying boundaries of time, place, chronology. Fluid as light itself, animated by startling imagery, vivid and peculiar characters, The Search for Heinrich Schlögel is a hymn to brooding memory, the enduring need to inhabit story, and a haunting insistence upon endless possibilities within possibility. That is to say, hope.”

--Gina Ochsner, author of The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight

"Martha Baillies extraordinary The Search for Heinrich Schlögel is not quite like any other book Ive read. It invites us on a hallucinatory journey to the Arctic and through time. It asks us to live with mystery and wonder, which is what a work of art does. If it reminds me of anything, it is the fabulous, shape-shifting novels of the Icelandic writer Sjón."

--Catherine Bush, author of The Rules of Engagement and Accusation

—Booklist

"Baillie delivers a work of magical realism that captures the experience of postcolonial guilt...and gives voice to a silenced past."

—Starred and boxed Publishers Weekly

"Baillie is an excellent storyteller, combining adventure with deeper elements and the characters search for self. Highly recommended."

—Library Journal

Oprah lists The Search for Heinrich Schlögel as one of the 13 books to pick up this September:

"Bewitching riddle of a novel."

—O, the Oprah Magazine

“Martha Baillie has written a timeless masterpiece. Every page is full of haunting wonderment. Truly, I know of no novel quite like it—its a blessing. The Search for Heinrich Schlögel has dreamlike locutions, it tells the most unusual tale, and it brings the margins of the world to us with photographic immediacy. I was completely transported.”

—Howard Norman, author of Next Life Might Be Kinder

"How is it possible to find a person who doesnt know he's missing? How can we be entangled in the world, in history, and live a moral life? Heinrich Schlögel doesn't give up his secrets easily, but as time collapses and opens, an extraordinary person, and an astonishing reading experience, come into existence. Martha Baillies new novel is entirely original, remembered yet created, truthful yet fictional, old, alive and visionary."

--Madeleine Thien, author of Dogs at the Perimeter

"The Search for Heinrich Schlögel is utterly distinctive, a fictional biography that drifts so imperceptibly into dream that it's impossible to tell where the reality of it ends and the fantasy begins. There's something of Nabokov here, and also something of Rip Van Winkle. Baillie has written an ode to those things that resist time, like a photograph, and those things that relinquish themselves to it, like a painting, resulting in a novel that is itself a little bit of both."

—Kevin Brockmeier, author of The Illumination

“Capacious, capricious, mischievous, The Search for Heinrich Schlögel moves like a quantum experiment, defying boundaries of time, place, chronology. Fluid as light itself, animated by startling imagery, vivid and peculiar characters, The Search for Heinrich Schlögel is a hymn to brooding memory, the enduring need to inhabit story, and a haunting insistence upon endless possibilities within possibility. That is to say, hope.”

—Gina Ochsner, author of The Russian Dreambook of Color and Flight

"Martha Baillies extraordinary The Search for Heinrich Schlögel is not quite like any other book Ive read. It invites us on a hallucinatory journey to the Arctic and through time. It asks us to live with mystery and wonder, which is what a work of art does. If it reminds me of anything, it is the fabulous, shape-shifting novels of the Icelandic writer Sjón."

—Catherine Bush, author of The Rules of Engagement and Accusation

Praise for The Incident Report (longlisted for the 2009 Giller Prize and one of the Globe and Mails Best Books of 2009)

“Baillies novel contains real tenderness, rendered in beautiful prose with compelling restraint.”

—Quill and Quire

“Baillie is a naturally figurative writer and, through precise and concrete imagery, captures, paradoxically, what is simply too much for measured words.”

—Globe and Mail

Praise for The Shape I Gave You

“Baillies 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. The Shape I Gave You is exquisitely genuine . . . Baillies examination of emotion is unfaltering in its deep compassion.”

—Globe and Mail

“[An] old-fashioned quality . . . gives Baillies work its charm and elegance. Her stories have weight and value history. . . . Baillies made a strong statement on the pain of grief and the unexpected way in which compassion can be sown. Shes also shown that with each new novel her voice becomes stronger.”

—NOW (Toronto)