Inger Ash Wolfe Books in Order
Explore Inger Ash Wolfe books in order, including Hazel Micallef and Michael Redhill titles, with quick summaries, series notes, and where to start.
Last updated: July 4, 2026
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Publication Order
18 books
Impromptu Feats of Balance
by Inger Ash Wolfe
1990
Redhill's first poetry collection is alert to awkward grace, emotional risk, and the small instabilities of everyday life. These early poems are controlled and witty, but never too tidy to let feeling in.
Lake Nora Arms
by Inger Ash Wolfe
1994
This poetry collection turns lake country into a place of memory, longing, and shifting perspective. Redhill mixes lyric intensity with narrative play, so the landscape feels both familiar and slightly haunted.
Asphodel
by Inger Ash Wolfe
1997
A poetry collection of night roads, desire, family memory, and ordinary scenes lit from strange angles. Redhill moves easily between intimacy and distance, making the everyday world feel charged and a little unsettled.
Lost Classics
by Inger Ash Wolfe
2000
This anthology gathers essays from dozens of writers on great books that have slipped from view. It is a lively, affectionate collection about reading, memory, and the strange afterlife of overlooked favorites.
Building Jerusalem
by Inger Ash Wolfe
2001
Set in Toronto on New Year's Eve, 1899, this play gathers four public figures for a night of argument and ambition. Redhill uses their meeting to ask what kind of country and century are about to begin.
Goodness
by Inger Ash Wolfe
2001
A recently divorced writer travels through Europe researching Holocaust history and becomes entangled in a story about memory, guilt, and an accused war criminal. This play layers testimony and desire into a searching moral drama.
Light-Crossing
by Inger Ash Wolfe
2001
These poems focus on love, attraction, grief, and the invisible currents between people. Redhill writes with restless intelligence, using small moments to open bigger questions about attachment, loss, and the body's memory.
Martin Sloane
by Inger Ash Wolfe
2001
When the elusive artist Martin Sloane vanishes without warning, Jolene is left to piece together their long, complicated history. The novel tracks love, disappearance, friendship, and the uneasy power art can hold over a life.
Fidelity: Stories
by Inger Ash Wolfe
2003
This story collection looks at loyalty, betrayal, family silence, and people caught in traps of their own making. The mood shifts from darkly funny to quietly bruising, but the human tension never lets up.
Consolation
by Inger Ash Wolfe
2006
In 1856, an English apothecary in Toronto turns to photography and creates a record that later disappears into Lake Ontario. In the present day, a grieving widow follows her late husband's obsession with that lost past.
The Calling
by Inger Ash Wolfe
2008
Hazel Micallef thought Port Dundas had gone quiet, until a terminally ill woman is found brutally murdered. As more staged killings follow, Hazel has to hunt a killer whose crimes mix ritual, belief, and deliberate terror.
The Taken
by Inger Ash Wolfe
2009
Recovering from back surgery and stuck in her ex-husband's house, Hazel Micallef is drawn into a nightmare that starts with a body in a lake and a story in the local paper. Someone is staging a cruel game, and Hazel is part of it.
A Door in the River
by Inger Ash Wolfe
2011
What looks like a freak death from a sting does not sit right with Hazel Micallef. As bodies mount and jurisdictions clash, she uncovers a much stranger and uglier crime moving through small-town Ontario.
Red Hand
by Inger Ash Wolfe
2012
A standalone short story published on its own after being left out of Fidelity: Stories. Brief, dark, and unsettling, it shows Redhill working in a tighter register, where private unease quickly turns into something stranger.
Saving Houdini
by Inger Ash Wolfe
2014
After a stage trick sends 11-year-old Dashiel Woolf from 2011 back to 1926 Toronto, he teams up with a new friend to get home. Their plan may also change the final days of Harry Houdini.
The Night Bell
by Inger Ash Wolfe
2015
When murdered children's bones are uncovered beneath a new subdivision, Hazel Micallef is pulled into a case that links old local secrets to fresh killings. The investigation also reopens a childhood wound and pushes Hazel toward a very personal reckoning.
Bellevue Square
by Inger Ash Wolfe
2017
Toronto bookseller Jean Mason becomes obsessed when people insist they have seen her double roaming Kensington Market. Her search for the doppelganger turns into a tense, slippery story about identity, paranoia, and who gets to control the truth.
Twitch Force
by Inger Ash Wolfe
2019
Redhill's return to poetry brings together science, aging, family history, grief, and flashes of absurd humour. The poems feel curious and alive, mixing hard thought with the messy, repeatable habits of being human.
Where should I start?
If you want the Hazel Micallef mysteries: The Calling → The Taken → A Door in the River → The Night Bell
If you want a mind-bending literary thriller: Bellevue Square
If you want his earlier literary fiction: Martin Sloane → Consolation
If you want a younger-reader adventure: Saving Houdini
If you want poetry and short fiction: Lake Nora Arms → Light-Crossing → Fidelity: Stories
Author bio
Inger Ash Wolfe is the pen name of Michael Redhill, an American-born Canadian novelist, poet, and playwright who was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on June 12, 1966, and grew up mostly in the Toronto area. That mix of outsider and local shows up again and again in his work. His books are often rooted in Toronto and Ontario, but they also carry the feeling of someone looking at a place from a slight angle.
His road into writing was not neat. He spent time at Indiana University before returning to study at York University and the University of Toronto, moving through acting, film, and English along the way. He also did the usual patchwork of jobs that many writers know well, including bookselling, house painting, waiting tables, editing, and script work for film and television.
He came to writing the long way around.
Poetry was one of his first homes. Early collections like Impromptu Feats of Balance, Lake Nora Arms, Asphodel, and Light-Crossing show the things he would keep returning to: memory, desire, family pressure, the odd charge of ordinary life, and the way a landscape can hold emotion. Even when the poems are quiet, there is usually a nervous little current running underneath.
He also built a strong theatre career. His play Building Jerusalem, set on New Year's Eve 1899, won major Canadian theatre prizes, and Goodness showed how willing he was to take on history, testimony, and moral uncertainty in a more personal register. Readers who first meet him through the crime novels are sometimes surprised by how much dramatic instinct was already there in the plays.
Then he pulled off a very good literary disguise.
Starting in 2008, he published crime novels under the name Inger Ash Wolfe and kept the secret for several years. He revealed the pseudonym in 2012, and the name itself came from his grandmother's maiden name, Wolfinger. Those Hazel Micallef books, beginning with The Calling and continuing through The Taken, A Door in the River, and The Night Bell, let him work in a darker, more openly suspenseful mode. The series follows an older Ontario detective who is smart, irritable, funny, worn down, and hard to shake, and that mix is a big part of why readers stick with her. The Calling was later adapted into a film starring Susan Sarandon as Hazel.
As Michael Redhill, he wrote novels that move differently but share some of the same obsessions. Martin Sloane is a love story, a disappearance story, and an art novel all at once. Consolation ties 19th-century Toronto to the present through photography, grief, and buried history. Then Bellevue Square pushed into stranger territory, following a Toronto bookseller drawn into the mystery of her own double. That novel won the 2017 Scotiabank Giller Prize and brought him a much wider readership.
He does not stay in one lane. Saving Houdini is a time-travel adventure for younger readers, and Twitch Force marked a return to poetry after a long gap. Across forms, readers tend to come back for the same things: sharp intelligence, a taste for unease, and characters who feel slightly off-balance in ways that ring true.
Redhill has also spent years inside the book world, working with presses and helping shape the literary magazine Brick. He lives in Toronto, and the city keeps finding its way back into his work, sometimes lovingly, sometimes warily, often both at once.
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