My fiction is about the emotional power of music and dance, the interplay of time and memory, the meaning of discipline, and love—always love—and death. I fell in love with the viola and with music when I began studying with Max Aronoff, a founding member of the Curtis String Quartet. Max taught me three life lessons: (1) The music is in the rests; (2) if you break things into component parts, you’ll figure out how to put together the whole; and (3) practice, practice, practice.
Martha Anne Toll is a novelist and literary and cultural critic. Her debut novel, Three Muses, won the Petrichor Prize for Finely Crafted Fiction and was subsequently published by Regal House Publishing (2022). Her next novel, Duet for One, will appear in Spring 2025. Three Muses won wide praise from national outlets including the Washington Post, New York Magazine’s Vulture, NPR, and LA Parent, and was shortlisted for the Gotham Book Prize. Toll is a recipient of Fellowships from the Vashon Artist Residency, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in Virginia and the South of France, Monson Arts, and Dairy Hollow. She is a member of the National Book Critics Circle, and serves on the Board of Directors of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation.
A graduate of Yale, Toll holds a B.A. Degree in Music, and her classical music training informs her artistic practice. She holds a J.D. Degree from Boston University School of Law, and comes to writing professionally after a career dedicated to social justice. As the founding Executive Director of the Butler Family Fund, she developed and led programs to prevent and end homelessness, abolish the death penalty, and combat racial injustice and inequity in the U.S. criminal justice system. She established a partnership with the Oak Foundation in Geneva and London to achieve similar aims. Toll grew up in Philadelphia, and now lives with her climate activist husband in Washington, D.C. They are the lucky parents of two adult daughters.
Award-winning fiction:
Duet for One is a beautiful meditation on love and the great vessel of time. Begin reading it to be stirred by its symphonic prose, and soon you’ll harmonize and fall in love with its unforgettable characters.”
- Jai Chakrabarti, author of A Play for the End of the World and A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness
Duet for One is a lovely story about artistry, time, memory, and romance. Martha Anne Toll has a wonderful way of writing about music. It is a balm to the spirit!
-Lydia Kiesling, author of Mobility and The Golden State
Music -- like love -- is a challenge to both the senses and the intellectual mind. In this poignant and attentively-written novel, Martha Anne Toll writes about the triumphs and sorrows of these two elements of human life, and considers how they might intertwine. Duet for One unfolds with symphonic sweep, each of its movements revealing deeper layers of emotion and insight into the central characters. The great works -- works by Brahms, Beethoven, Schubert, Paganini, Mozart, Smetana -- serve as the backdrop for Toll's clever and intricate storytelling. Truly, a memorable novel.
-Pauls Toutonghi, author of The Refugee Ocean and Red Weather
“Exquisite.” Washington Post
“Author Martha Anne Toll … weave[s] an intimate portrait of romance and heartbreak …[the]novel is not only notable for its poignant prose, clever foreshadowing, and deeply moving ending, it also comments on many of the harsher truths present in the ballet world, acknowledging the reality without glamorizing it.” NPR
“The wonder of this book lies not just in tracking these stories through two decades toward their inevitable convergence, but also in witnessing how skillfully Toll tends to them…. By the time you finish this, you’ll realize you’re in the hands of a maestro.” Vulture (by New York Magazine)
“An affecting chamber piece with plenty to say about art, trauma, and healing.” Kirkus starred review
“Martha Anne Toll’s beautiful and emotionally resonant first novel won the 2020 Petrichor Prize for Finely Crafted Fiction, and it’s clear why.” “A Fraught Fling, Deep in Meaning,” Lilith Magazine
“With healthy doses of nostalgia and authenticity—and a tear-jerker ending—Three Muses is a deeply honest story that embraces the magic of fiction while not shying away from life’s harsher realities.” POINTE Magazine
“An exquisitely crafted novel…. What makes this story sing is the acute way Toll paints the tension that takes place on stage. Even those who are not connoisseurs of the dance form will be enraptured by Toll’s imagistic language that manages to somersault and twirl in ways that make the dancers’ moves real.” L.A. Parent
“This is a remarkable debut novel … Above all else, it is highly recommended as a first class read.” Critics Circle
“In this beautiful, dark novel, Toll has choreographed the mysterious ways these forces push and pull and shape the lives of her characters – lives of terrible loss and precious if dismaying survival – through their dissonances, harmonies, deprivations, and recoveries. A meditation on history, music, the catastrophic inheritances of the Holocaust, and the so common, painful hiddenness of hope itself, Three Muses captivates the reader from the first page to the last.”
- Paul Harding, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Tinkers, Enon, and This Other Eden
“Martha Anne Toll's Three Muses is so surprisingly soulful. The surprise doesn't lie in the existence of textured prose that explores dance, music, love, and time in wholly different ways; it lies in how that textured prose actually creates a new time signature wholly dependent on practice and discipline. This is phenomenal writing. It just is.”
- Kiese Makeba Laymon, bestselling author of Heavy, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, and Long Division
Three Muses made The Millions’ Most Anticipated: The Great Second Half of 2022 list