My Face In The Light
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LONGLISTED FOR THE 2022 TORONTO BOOK AWARD
“My mother is an artist and I am a liar. Or, if I scratch the surface, my mother is a sick woman and I am an actress . . .”
Justine feels uneasy in her marriage, her theatre career and her relationship with her estranged mother, a famous painter. An intuitive and uncanny mimic, distinguished by a pronounced scar across her forehead (the result of a childhood accident), Justine has made acting the centre of her life since she was a teenager, but lately her outwardly charmed life in Toronto has begun to ring false. After a disastrous audition in London, England, a chance encounter with a stranger leads to an unorthodox business proposition that would allow Justine to abandon the world she knows indefinitely. As the complications and contradictions of leaving a life behind swell to the point of crisis, Justine must confront the collateral damage of a traumatic, long-repressed past.
In psychologically astute prose full of provocative insights, My Face in the Light is a piercing, poignant novel about truth in art and identity. It’s the story of a young woman owning up to the lies she’s fallen in love with, and figuring out if she can still recognize herself when she finally lets them go.
MARTHA SCHABAS’s first novel, Various Positions, was named a Book of the Year by The Globe and Mail, Quill & Quire and NOW Magazine, and was shortlisted for an Evergreen Fiction Award. She was The Globe and Mail’s dance critic from 2015 to 2020, where she also wrote about theatre and books. Her essays, arts criticism and short fiction have appeared in publications including The Walrus, Hazlitt and The New Quarterly.