Winner, Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award
Longlisted, Newfoundland and Labrador Fiction Award and Miramichi Reader's "The Very Best!" Book Awards (Novel)
One of 49th Shelf's Books of the Year

The time is 1937. The place: the Basque Country, embroiled in the Spanish Civil War. Polyglot and British intelligence agent Temerity West encounters Kostya Nikto, a Soviet secret police agent. Kostya has been dispatched to assassinate a doctor as part of the suppression of a rogue communist faction. When Kostya finds his victim in the company of Temerity, she expects Kostya to execute her -- instead, he spares her.

Several weeks later, Temerity is reassigned to Moscow. When she is arrested by the secret police, she once again encounters Kostya. His judgement impaired by pain, morphine, and alcohol, he extricates her from a dangerous situation and takes her to his flat. In the morning, they both awaken to the realities of what Kostya has done. Although Kostya wants to keep Temerity safe, the cost will be high. And Temerity must decide where her loyalties lie.

Writing about violence with an unusual grace, Michelle Butler Hallett tells a story of complicity, love, tyranny, and identity. Constant Nobody is a thrilling novel that asks how far an individual will go to protect another — whether out of love or fear.

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.

Michelle Butler Hallett's profile page

• Winner, Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award
• Long-listed, Newfoundland and Labrador Fiction Award
• Long-listed, One of <i>49th Shelf</i>'s Books of the Year
• Long-listed, <i>Miramichi Reader</i>'s "The Very Best!" Book Awards (Novel)