Finalist for the 2023 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards

In an unnamed town in the summer of 1998, Judy is an isolated and inexperienced teenager on the cusp of adulthood struggling to craft an identity for herself—especially as the artist she wants to be.

There is little help around her. Her only friends are increasingly obsessed with a cultish belief in a coming "Big Shadow." Her mother is afraid of life and finds solace in TV shows. At her lowest point, Judy meets Maurice Blunt, a visiting summer poetry class professor who is a "has-been" fixture of the 1970s NYC punk music scene. Judy believes Maurice—a man more than twice her age desperately seeking lost adoration—is the ticket out of her current life. Soon, she begins taking secret weekend trips to visit him.

Judy's visits to his apartment in New York bring hopes of belonging to the city's cultural world and making a living as a video artist. With each trip and frustrated promise, however, she feels the creeping realization that there is a price to pay for her golden ticket entry into this insular and moribund scene. Judy must navigate the shifting power dynamics with her aging gatekeeper and the possibility of building an early adult identity alone.

An affecting novel of psychological nuance and dark humour, Big Shadow explores the costs of self-deceit, fandom, and tenuous ambitions, exposing the lies we’ll tell ourselves and the promises we'll make to edge closer to what we want… or what we think we want.

MARTA BALCEWICZ spent her early childhood in Pomerania and Madrid, and now lives in Toronto. Her work has appeared in Catapult, Tin House online, Vol. 1. Brooklyn, Washington Square Review, The Rumpus, and Passages North, amongst other publications. Her fiction was anthologized in Tiny Crimes (Catapult, 2018). She received a fellowship from Tin House Workshops in 2022. Big Shadow is her first novel.

Marta Balcewicz's profile page

• Nominated, Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards

“In magnifying the myopic struggle of art versus commerce and ambition versus reality, Big Shadow most viscerally captures the essence of the formative years of the human experience.” —Aquarium Drunkard

“Whenever [Big Shadow] seems to be going one way, Balcewicz swerves on to a backroad plot, offering tightly orchestrated alternatives that skewer heart and mind.” —Chicago Review of Books

“Balcewicz accurately depicts [the late nineties] while simultaneously capturing the out-of-time quality that characterizes certain periods of our lives. She uses her narrative power well, bouncing ahead to the aftermath before things have entirely got going…This formal sturdiness is something I enjoy: when a writer shows you all the story’s exits, confident that you’ll want to remain inside.” —EVENT Magazine

“Marta Balcewicz captures a sense of late slacker aesthetic, with a languid cadence that propels the story. It is the clarity and confidence of the prose and leisurely pacing that drive the narrative.” —Prism International

“Authors depicting the inner revolutions of boredom run the danger of exposing readers to unbearable levels of monotony. Toronto writer Marta Balcewicz’s debut novel Big Shadow explores teenage apathy in detail, but avoids this all too common problem by infusing the book with charming doses of quaintness and naïveté.” —The Toronto Star

“It is Judy’s day-to-day life that dominates the narrative—one so well-expressed that what impresses the reader is not what happens, but how it is described.” —Winnipeg Free Press

“Big Shadow illustrates how beauty in literature is fundamentally about perspective. Fiction can turn the ordinary into the extraordinary — something mundane into something worth noticing. All it takes is someone ‘uniquely qualified to be the one who observed.'” —Literary Review of Canada

“Set in 1998, Big Shadow is a coming-of-age novel in which there are no easy ways to grow up—the only way out is through one’s own mistakes and triumphs.” —Foreword Reviews