1940s Vancouver. The Japanese have just bombed Pearl Harbour and racial tension is building in Vancouver. The RCMP are rounding up “suspicious” young men, and fishing boats and property are soon seized from Steveston fishers; internment camps in BC’s interior are only months away.

The stories in Jim Christy’s latest collection span time and space, taking us from the depression-era Deep South to the modern-day Vancouver commute. Private eyes. Old drunks. Yuppies, hippies, and everyone in between gets the trademark Christy work-over.

Touched renders the emotional and intellectual implosion experienced by Jade King, a young university student. This debut novel challenges the social stigma attached to such altered states and traces the effects of physical violation and psychic trauma.

Written in the style of the “hard-boiled” detective thriller, Toy Gun is very much a literary treatment of contemporary life in one of the world’s most densely populated urban centres.

Humorous, whimsical and dipped in science fiction, Traversing Leonard is a fast-paced first novel about a friendship that grows against the odds, about ambition driven by love and a never-ending search for a sense of belonging.

From birth, the child was locked away in a minuscule cell, at #804 of level 5969 of the Edifice. Around him … only concrete, without a view of the outside world. And two people: the tyrannical father, slowly killing himself; and the mother, fearing eviction. Unmoving in his roost, the child’s life will be disrupted by a transformation that will reveal an unexpected horizon.

The Underwood is a loss-of-innocence novel set in an atmosphere pervaded with nostalgia and a yearning for a bygone era. Holden Caulfield meets Barton Fink.

Mortician Mylène Andrews spends her days dealing with death, but has never quite figured out how to live. After her estranged mother passes away, adult-orphaned Mylène sets out in her hearse to see the graveyards her mother visited before her death, guided by a collection of unsent postcards and the residual wake of a tragedy long-considered buried.

Valery the Great is a crackling, electric collection of dark humour that follows the bizarre and beautiful lives of its protagonists. Sometimes sweet and gentle, sometimes sharply sarcastic, the unique narrative voices in this collection are always powerfully touching.

Part travelogue, part autofiction, part record of living under Western regimes that torture, kidnap, and murder its own citizens and those who wish to cross its borders, White Lie is a collection of super-short fictions.