From Giller Prize-winning author Michael Redhill comes a new novel—part historical yarn, part dystopian dispatch—about a magician confronted by powers beyond his control.

"I shall tell of changes wrought in me that altered the course of my life. And if my clumsy tale so inspires you, perhaps you will help spread its message. The world will want to know what I know.”

In the late-eighteenth century, the magician Gustavus Katterfelto has made a name for himself travelling across the English countryside with a bag of tricks. For audiences, his astonishing stunts—detaching a cat’s tail from its body, pulling an ace of hearts from an egg—are pure magic. For Katterfelto, each one is carefully engineered and executed with the help of his colleague, confidante, and friend, Roger Gossage.

Yet one day in their travels, the two men come across a mystifying object beyond their explanation: a metal horn emitting a disembodied woman’s voice. She calls herself Siri of Toronto, and claims to speak from a place plagued by climate catastrophe and social unrest. As they begin to use the horn in their magic shows, Gossage and Katterfelto must work to understand the origin and message of Siri’s call—a quest that will put them against the limits of reason and test Gossage's allegiance to the man he calls his friend.

Endlessly inventive, richly imagined, and entirely its own, The Trial of Katterfelto is a consciousness-expanding novel that writes directly into the most urgent questions we face as a species: who we are, what we have done, and what we might do from here.

Michael Redhill was born in Baltimore, Maryland, but has lived in Toronto most of his life. Educated in the United States and Canada, he took seven years to complete a three-year BA in acting, film, and finally, English. Since 1988, he has published five collections of poetry, had eight plays of varying lengths performed, and been a cultural critic and essayist. He has worked as an editor, a ghost-writer, an anthologist, a scriptwriter for film and television, and in leaner times, as a waiter, a house-painter, and a bookseller. Michael is a former publisher and one of the editors of Brick, a journal of things literary. His most recent books are Fidelity, a collection of short fiction, from Doubleday Canada, Martin Sloane, a novel from Doubleday Canada (nominated for the Giller Prize, 2001; the Trillium Prize, 2001; the Torgi Award, 2002; the City of Toronto Book Award, 2002; the Books in Canada/Amazon.com Best First Novel Prize, 2002; and winner of the Commonwealth Writersâ?? Prize for Best First Book, Canada/Caribbean, 2001); Light-Crossing, a collection of poetry from Torontoâ??s House of Anansi Press; and Building Jerusalem, a play from Playwrights Canada Press (winner of the 2001 Dora Mavor Moore Award for Best New Play; recipient of a Chalmers Canadian Play Award, 2001; and nominated for a Governor Generalâ??s Literary Award, 2001). His new play, Goodness was published by Coach House Press in 2005 His latest novel, Consolation, was published by Doubleday Canada in 2006 and won the 2007 Toronto Book Award. It was also long-listed for the Man Booker Prize.

Michael Redhill's profile page