In deluded your sailors, Michelle Butler Hallett brings her wry humour and imagination to two distinct and interwoven stories, embracing both the eighteenth-century New World and contemporary Newfoundland and Labrador. Past and present spark off each other to ignite whirling fires in the lives of her flawed and darkly-drawn characters.

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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“_deluded your sailors_ is a convoluted, genre-hopping behemoth that tracks back three centuries via damaged characters’ oral storytelling, court documents, and other loose ephemera. Structurally the novel is akin to the work of English writer David Mitchell, with its cavalcade of rowdy personalities plunging deep into a rabbit hole of disparate, yet somehow interconnected, storylines. ... Hallett deserves credit for her immense vision. The novel’s form may be challenging because its underlying quest6ions are formidable: How much of who we are is defined by our collective past? What if that past is a lie, a forgery? What solace can be found in sailing the shifting seas of memory? ... _deluded your sailors_’ imaginative breadth and stylistic inventiveness more than compensate for the occasionally rough ride.”