Dead Girl Diaries is Marianne Paul's most recent novel, released Spring 2009 by BookLand Press. Maxine is a young university student who is murdered and left at the side of a highway. Her ghost tells the tale from the other world, an unearthly place where a renegade angel helps her escape the boredom of paradise, and God makes random appearances as a disembodied Voice, a snoring mountain and a manic rock star. Maxine, it seems, is never as much alive as when she is dead.

With a degree in religion, Paul plays with themes of belief and ultimate meaning. "I wrote the original draft of Dead Girl Diaries to respond to my daughter’s questions about death - what happens to us, where do we go, do we disintegrate into nothing?" she says. "I didn’t know the answers, I told her, but the afterlife landscape of this story may very well be true, certainly as true as anything else. Nothing is as unlikely, and so lovely and absurd, as life itself. Why would death be any less so?" 

"The writing in Dead Girl Diaries took me away - the poetry and the force. Paul writes in a manner that I would call a novel of ideas, where the characters are driven by ideas. Even their dialogue is created so as to move forward the purpose of the telling, which is to underline the theme of hope, of continuance or relative truth, and always dynamic change. I call it walking on the water of moving earth. This is the image as I see it, and how I would describe the theme of the book." 

~ Elaine Auerbach

"This book is so wonderful. The ending to Dead Girl Diaries makes sense of life." 

~ Veronica Ross

Tending Memory won the Canadian Aid Literary Award in 2006, and is a story driven by poetry and motion, the concept of journey as a way of life. "I didn't want to write a Wizard of Oz style story," Paul says, "where the main character, a teenage runaway, finally realizes there is no place like home, and returns to her family and past life repentant. In this story, the open road is Michaela's home, and it is through journey that she comes to terms with grief and loss. I also wanted to play with the concept of literal truth versus metaphorical truth. In the ground of her imagination, Michaela creates a story about herself that is as valid, if not more valid, than the actual events of her life. Not only does it allow her to cope, but more importantly, it tells her (and the readers) who she is at her core."

“Tending Memory is absolutely exquisite in its lyricism and story, and truly one of the best novels that I have read in years. An extraordinary accomplishment." 

~ Mickey Turnbull-Coughlin

"The writing is stunning. Tending Memory is definitely a poet's novel. There are lines which leap out at me. This will be a book I return to and there have not been many of those." 

~ Nancy Morrey

Twice in a Blue Moon 

This recently published book is the reworking and updating of The Shunning, a novel Paul wrote almost twenty years ago and now out-of-print. "People change over the years - I'm a different writer than I was when I started out. It was wonderful to be able to retell the story of Elizabeth Barnes and Aley Pierce through a different lens. Although much of the book is changed, the central themes remain - there are elements in our lives that we can't control, that define us and that move beneath the surface of the concrete world. Censorship is a denial of the spirit and works at many levels, in the greater community with actions such as book burnings and other acts of violence - but also within us, as self-censorship." 

"Twice in a Blue Moon explores what it means to be talented, to move out into the imagination and to be pulled back to the real world. The book tells the passionate story of two extraordinary women: Aley Pierce, a fiercely independent writer with an uncanny affinity for water and a strong will to live life on her own terms, and Elizabeth Barnes, a water dowser and clairvoyant living in the same vicinity but a century and a half earlier. As the two lives unfold along strangely similar paths, the two women gradually come to know themselves, to accept and nourish their uniqueness and their talents, and to stand by their convictions despite severe obstacles and rejections. The author has woven two stories into an intriguing whole.” 

~ Robert Morgan, Publisher, BookLand Press