By Martin West
This is not the Alberta world of oil and hockey and wheat, but of people at night, living alternate lives, wearing clothes that usually remain hidden in the depths of closets. When they emerge from these closets wearing these clothes, these shopkeepers, lawyers, and students do things to themselves and each other that it would take Freud to explicate. Everywhere in the valley lies the fear of loneliness, the obsession with desire, and the human fixation with the unknown.
By Mark Jarman
From the author of 19 Knives and My White Planet comes a brilliant suite of stories built around music and travel. The five stories that comprise Czech Techno are replete with the sizzle and jump we have come to expect from a Mark Jarman story. And matters of the heart are never far away, weaving through these tales like a knife blade through sand.
By Tom Osborne
Dead Man in the Orchestra Pit is a singularly Canadian novel featuring crime, culture, and sports. Written in the vein of John Kennedy Toole (Confederacy of Dunces) and JP Donleavy, Dead Man in the Orchestra Pit is set in Vancouver during an early 80s Grey Cup weekend.
By Grant Buday
Cyril is the only Canadian-born member of the Andrachuk family, his parents and older brother having survived Stalin’s systematic starving of the Ukraine. His brother’s brittle bones are not the only legacy of Stalin. Cyril’s famine-free childhood has built up a distance between him and the rest of the household.
Art, love, and history furnish the setting in this tale. The Delusionist is a novel of longing, loss and rediscovered joy.
By Jenn Farrell
These stories deal with sex, love, work, birth, and death in alternately moving, shocking, funny, and at times devastating ways. Whether these characters are facing the death of a parent, bad love choices, the possibility of unwanted pregnancy, the rupture of friendships, teen violence, or the exploration of sado-masochistic sex, Farrell exposes their ticking cores and pulls the reader along every step of the way.
“Farrell excels at very short, sharply realized tales that display a startling repertoire of styles and structural innovations.”
— Vancouver Review
Make no mistake; The Devil You Know belongs on the shelf alongside Nights Below Station Street.
— Elizabeth Bachinsky
Dirtbags is a novel about reckoning—with one’s past, one’s choices, and one’s expectations for the future. Dirtbags deals with the bonds between women, the cycle of poverty, self-destruction, loss of family, the outlaw code, and the fragile beauty of the human condition.
The Dreamlife of Bridges is the debut novel from Vancouver writer Robert Strandquist. Leo is a middle-aged, divorced handyman capable of mending almost anything outside of himself. The denial of his son’s death, and his inability to deal with his own pain, has rendered his life fractured and untenable.
The stories in Elysium are about the difficulties of life we all encounter as human beings, the fragility of life—the physical, mental, and spiritual challenges we must try to overcome.
At once bitterly funny, provocative and poignant, this remarkable collection – follow up to Greeting from the Vodka Sea, Gudgeon’s short story debut – The Encyclopedia of Lies builds on his growing literary reputation, offering up the work of a great storyteller at his very best.
By Nelly Arcan (translated by David Scott Hamilton)
Exit is at once a profound examination of what it is that drives someone to want to end their life, as well as how that urge can be turned on its head against all odds. Written with her signature brio and acerbic wit, Nelly Arcan’s last novel is a hymn to life.
