The Insomniac Library is proud to republish for the first time in over twenty years Marian Engel's memorable first novel, Sarah Bastard's Notebook. First published in 1968 by Longman Canada, the novel tells the funny and frustrating story of thirty-year-old ex-academic Sarah Porlock as she makes her way through the minefields of career and love in late-1960s Toronto.Long recognized for her groundbreaking novel Bear (1976), Engel's first novel can now rightly be seen to inaugurate and participate in a number of important literary traditions. As in Richler, Gallant, and Callaghan, the novel is a tug of war between Europe and Canada as the heroine's true home. At the same time, it is a stylistic intervention reminiscent of Symons with its notebook conceit. Finally, Sarah Bastard's Notebook is also one of the first unabashedly feminist novels written in Canada, founding a tradition that would continue with the work of Margaret Atwood, Aritha van Herk, and many others.

Marian Engel was a Canadian novelist. Engel's best-known novel is Bear, and her other novels include No Clouds of Glory, The Honeyman Festival, The Glassy Sea, and Lunatic Villas. She won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction for Bear in 1976, and was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1982. Marian Engel died in Toronto in 1985.

Marian Engel's profile page

"Marian Engel's fiction ... is so clean and simple, implicative and sonorous, illuminated by an artist's imaginative power." — Doris Grumach, The New York Times Book Review