Finalist for the Rogers/Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize.
“[Marcus] Royston is one of the most convincing characters I’ve come across in Canadian fiction. . . . Interspersed with the biting wit is an almost elegiac quality to the writing. [Smith] is a successor to that rumpled mensch of St. Urbain Street… Mordecai Richler”
—The Globe and Mail
“The best Canadian novel published in 2004 was Muriella Pent…. Russell Smith is one of the best stylists of my generation. His prose is exact, surprising, and written by a man with a fine ear.”
—Andre Alexis, author of Childhood, in The Globe and Mail
“The heart of the novel beats in time with D.H. Lawrence and Henry Miller and all the writers before and after them who, when you sweat their books down to the essentials, say simply that sex is an artery of life. Muriella Pent plays out on a bigger canvas than Smith has worked on before. It’s the work of a good novelist who wants to be a better novelist. And has become one. There’s a gifted and sensually alert writer at the wheel here.”
—National Post