Mary Novik is the author of two novels set in the past, Conceit and Muse, in which fiction and fact are creatively mingled. Novik is engaged in an "ongoing exploration of minor characters in the lives of great figures of literature" and is part of the current boom in historical fiction in Canada. The novel Conceit (Doubleday 2007) is about Pegge Donne, the daughter of the poet John Donne. The Globe and Mail called Conceit "a magnificent novel of 17th-century London." Conceit won The Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, was long-listed for the Giller, and was chosen as a book of the year by The Globe and Mail. Novik's novel Muse (Doubleday 2013) is the second in a series of works imagining "the circumstances surrounding the creation of venerated works of art: in this case, the love sonnets of the Italian bard, Petrarch." From Wikipedia