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100 ratings | 26 reviews | avg rating:4.07

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Michelle Butler Hallett

Goodreads Author

Born

St John's, Canada

Website

http://mbutlerhallett.wordpress.com/

Genre

Fiction, Historical Fiction

Influences

George Orwell, Flannery O'Connor, Christopher Marlowe, Anna Akhmatova, ...more

Member Since

May 2009

URL

https://www.goodreads.com/michellebutlerhallett

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Author's surname is Butler Hallett, not Hallett.
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Michelle Butler Hallett, she/her, writes fiction about violence, evil, love and grace. Author of the novels Constant Nobody, This Marlowe, deluded your sailors, Sky Waves and Double-blind, and the short story collection The shadow side of grace. Her short stories are widely anthologized in Hard Ol' Spot, The Vagrant Revue of New Fiction, Everything Is So Political, Running the Whale's Back, and Best American Mystery Stories 2014 . Michelle Butler Hallett lives in St. John's.
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Butler Hallett's work, at once striking, memorable and difficult to categorize, wrestles with themes of power, evil, complicity, illness, identity, hope, love, and grace.

2016's This Marlowe wrestles with the agonies Author's surname is Butler Hallett, not Hallett.
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Michelle Butler Hallett, she/her, writes fiction about violence, evil, love and grace. Author of the novels Constant Nobody, This Marlowe, deluded your sailors, Sky Waves and Double-blind, and the short story collection The shadow side of grace. Her short stories are widely anthologized in Hard Ol' Spot, The Vagrant Revue of New Fiction, Everything Is So Political, Running the Whale's Back, and Best American Mystery Stories 2014 . Michelle Butler Hallett lives in St. John's.
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Butler Hallett's work, at once striking, memorable and difficult to categorize, wrestles with themes of power, evil, complicity, illness, identity, hope, love, and grace.

2016's This Marlowe wrestles with the agonies of faith, duty, and love against a setting of religious and political turmoil, quotidian surveillance, widespread fear for security of one's country, questions of how to help an influx of refugees, the weight of the body politic, and the state of the soul. The Miramichi Reader calls This Marlowe "a masterful work of historical fiction," adding that the novel "assuredly has all the intrigue of a modern spy thriller." The Toronto Star notes "Butler Hallett's prose is at once canny and tender ... perfectly paced and gracefully wrought, This Marlowe is superior historical fare," while Quill & Quire remarked "Complex, lyrical, and with a profound sense of a world long passed and humanity’s eternal motivations, This Marlowe holds up extremely well next to the most lauded recent historical fiction."

Butler Hallett's 2011 novel, deluded your sailors, follows characters in early eighteenth-century England and colonies, as well as in a republic of Newfoundland and Labrador in 2009. Linked to her 2008 novel, Sky Waves, deluded your sailors stares down abuse, identity and friendship in a startling story of violence, loss and love.

In Sky Waves, Butler Hallett draws on her radio background and her troubled relationship with history to create an ambitious work. Described by the author as "a demented 'aural' culture novel," Sky Waves is told as a drew, that is, as the ninety-eight meshes in a row of a fishing net. Characters and storylines are networked together, almost as a mural against a timeline of 1901 to 2005. The Maple Tree Literary Supplement called the novel "a dynamic and shape-shifting work that redefines the project of storytelling, which complicates oral/aural tradition."

Double-blind, which was shortlisted for the 2008 Sunburst Award.The Sunburst jury said "Sanity, madness, torture in the name of science -- Double-blind is wonderfully original while chillingly based in history... The writing is incredibly layered, with metaphor and symbol perfectly balanced against the hard neutrality of scientific language."

Of the story collection The shadow side of grace, The Globe and Mail notes "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 seems often to be creating from a subliminal place, riding on intuition, unencumbered by the counsel of editors."
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Average rating: 3.99 · 158 ratings · 66 reviews · 7 distinct works • Similar authors

	This Marlowe 4.26 avg rating — 62 ratings — published 2016 — 4 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Constant Nobody 4.15 avg rating — 48 ratings — 2 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Running the Whale's Back: Stories of Faith and Doubt from Atlantic Canada by Andrew Atkinson (Editor), Mark Harris (Editor), Carol Bruneau (Goodreads Author) 3.53 avg rating — 19 ratings — published 2013 — 2 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Double-blind 3.40 avg rating — 10 ratings — published 2007	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	The Shadow Side of Grace 3.30 avg rating — 10 ratings — published 2006	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Deluded Your Sailors 3.71 avg rating — 7 ratings — published 2011 — 2 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Sky Waves 3.50 avg rating — 2 ratings — published 2008	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

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Published on September 01, 2017 07:46

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Michelle is Currently Reading

Michelle Hallett is currently reading

War and Peace

by Leo Tolstoy

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Feb 14, 2016 06:35AM

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Philby: KGB Master Spy

by Phillip Knightley

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Aug 16, 2021 03:38AM

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Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control

by Stephen Kinzer

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Michelle’s Recent Updates

Michelle Hallett is now following Jillian Pardy's reviews
Aug 24, 2025 09:26AM · like
Michelle Hallett joined the group Galleon Books, Authors and Fans
Aug 24, 2025 09:24AM · 1 like · like

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Quotes by Michelle Butler Hallett (?)

“Honesty was an overrated virtue”
― Michelle Butler Hallett

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“The only secrets we got are the ones everybody knows”
― Michelle Butler Hallett

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“And if these objecting London-born men stuck their faces past their own dirty alleys — oh, far edges of the world — then they might blink in the strange shared sun and be stunned at how more than London lives, how more than London bleeds. If they’d prick their consciences and trouble themselves to voyage even as far as the Low Countries and there witness, as have I, burnt earth, and mud huts of princes, then these London men would invite the refugees to table and beg the privilege to anoint their feet.”
― Michelle Butler Hallett, This Marlowe

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Polls

What books about the Tudors or Tudor England would you like for our Group Read in April 2019?

Sovereign by C.J. Sansom

12 votes, 15.6%

Prince Arthur: The Tudor King Who Never Was by Sean Cunningham

11 votes, 14.3%

Young Bess by Margaret Irwin

6 votes, 7.8%

1536: The Year That Changed Henry VIII by Suzannah Lipscomb

6 votes, 7.8%

Uneasy Lies the Head by Jean Plaidy

6 votes, 7.8%

The Life of Thomas More by Peter Ackroyd

6 votes, 7.8%

Henry VIII by William Shakespeare

4 votes, 5.2%

Edward VI: The Lost King of England by Chris Skidmore

4 votes, 5.2%

With the Heart of a King: Elizabeth I of England, Philip II of Spain, and the Fight for a Nation's Soul and Crown by Benton Rain Patterson

3 votes, 3.9%

Mary Queen of Scots' Downfall: The Life and Murder of Henry, Lord Darnley by Robert Stedall

3 votes, 3.9%

This Marlowe by Michelle Butler Hallett

3 votes, 3.9%

MARY - Tudor Princess by Tony Riches

3 votes, 3.9%

The Tudors: The Complete Story of England's Most Notorious Dynasty by G.J. Meyer

3 votes, 3.9%

The White Rose Murders by Paul Doherty

3 votes, 3.9%

Wolsey: The Life of King Henry VIII's Cardinal by John Matusiak

2 votes, 2.6%

Graven With Diamonds: The Many Lives of Thomas Wyatt. Courtier, Poet, Assassin, Spy by Nicola Shulman

2 votes, 2.6%

Richard Hooker Prophet of Anglicanism by Philip B. Secor

0 votes, 0.0%

77 total votes

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Michelle’s Quotes

“Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I'm always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

tags: creative-process, escape, novels, reality, writing

626 likes

“Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the love a free man is never safe.”
― Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

tags: love, people, the-bluest-eye

60 likes

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