In Deluded Your Sailors, the culture industry is a weapon, a victim, and an opportunity, depending on the perspective of two main figures: the unsteady but perceptive Nichole Wright, whose discovery of crucial documents threatens a government-funded tourism project, and the politely menacing, shape-shifting Reverend Elias Winslow. And in parallel storytelling: an early eighteenth-century girl, daughter of a nameless prostitute, winds up first as object of depraved pleasure, espionage agent and courier, and finally captain of a Salem trading vessel. Her desperately threaded disguise holds until her unacknowledged past crashes into her frail present. Trapped, and finally forced to reveal many things kept hidden, she refuses to be exploited any further. But her defiance exacts a terrible cost.

One of Canada’s most courageous and original literary voices, Michelle Butler Hallett was born in St. John’s, Newfoundland. Her work, at once striking, memorable and difficult to categorize, has been praised by Books in Canada for “economy and power,” while The Globe and Mail notes that “demons are at work – the kind that lurk in the subconscious and surface, depending on the individual, as either despairing visions or acts of outright brutality.” Butler Hallett is the author of the critically acclaimed novels Deluded Your Sailors, Sky Waves, and Double-blind, shortlisted for the Sunburst Award. She is also the author of the short-story collection The shadow side of grace. Her stories appear in the anthologies Hard Ol’ Spot, The Vagrant Revue of New Fiction, Running the Whale’s Back, and Best American Mystery Stories 2014. Her latest novel, This Marlowe, was published in 2016. She resides in St. John’s.

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"Michelle Butler Hallett's shimmering sentences lure you and before you know it you are in the chronically self-deceived mind of narrator Josh Bozeman. Double-Blind is a thoroughly addictive literary thriller." -Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, author of Way Up and The Nettle Spinner