“HA! is an astonishing book, document, sleuth-epic, and quest. And your shaping of it makes it riveting, sardonic, heartfelt, deadpan hilarious and satiric, and sometimes grotesquely poignant. HA! is the most truly serious — not solemn — book I’ve read by a Canadian in years: necessary, unpedantically erudite, unseduced by its own potential to be charming … The reader’s sense of Aquin is forced to fluctuate, revise itself, and finally integrate absolutely opposite opinions, judgements and loyalties — an achievement that seems to me virtually unique in modern biography since The Quest for Corvo. You don’t know me, but it is not my practice to say such things. A Moby Dick of a book, HA! will not be forgotten in a lifetime. Magnificent!”
– Séan Virgo, author of A Traveller Came By, stories about dying and Telegony, editor