BC Books From the Mainland/Southwest

Longlisted for the ReLit Award (2005)

Foozlers is a 24-hour “Odyssey” that runs a juggernaut through the high- and lowlands of Vancouver. Jerry Lowe is the reluctant driver of a getaway car for two sketchy junkies on the make. A pair of cops spend a shift wobbling on the cusp of total breakdown. The groom-to-be in an Indian arranged marriage seeks an escape of the carnal variety. Soon, they will all intersect paths with a gas station attendant and a very “special” car wash operator. And s …

Kaspoit! puts speculative illustration to the most profuse series of crimes ever to take place on Canadian soil. Set in the lower mainland of Vancouver, the time is now—criminals are brazen, cops are cynical—and no one is trying to solve the disappearance of dozens of women. Throughout, the novel conveys a savage, dystopian depiction of a netherworld teeming with gangland crime, sexual exploitation, betrayal and murder. The language is neologistic—jarring and vulgar—creating an atmospher …

Finalist, City of Vancouver Book Award

Monday Night Man is a back alley view of East Vancouver netherworlds. Horst Nunn, Ray Bunce, and Boyle Rupp are a trio of middle-aged, underemployed, intelligent “plungers” striving for redemption through humour and long shots at the track.

Praise for Monday Night Man:

"These stories . . . combine the flavours of Dickens and Charles Bukowski, with a good hit of The Three Stooges thrown in." (Bruce Serafin, founder, Vancouver Review)

"Buday is a careful styl …

At a dinner party, Beth — thirty-six, single, and working as much overtime as she can get her hands on — impulsively announces that she's going to spend a night on Vancouver's mean streets in commiseration of the homeless. Unexpectedly, her hosts' son Mason — nine years old, small for his age, intense, intellectual and so shy he can't speak in company — whispers in his mother's ear that he wants to go with her. Mason's parents, good limousine liberals that they are, reluctantly allow him …

A courageous and timely novel, Tears of Mehndi explores the rich, complex and often heartbreaking lives of a tight-knit community in Vancouver’s Little India. Through the perspectives of several women whose lives intertwine over a generation, Raminder Sidhu deftly exposes the shrouded violence within the Indo-Canadian community, a difficult and often dissembled subject. Sidhu’s characters are women caught between two cultures, struggling to understand the traditions they are obliged to follo …

Beauty plus pity--that is the closest we can get to a definition of art." -Vladimir Nabokov

In this tragicomic modern immigrant's tale, Malcolm Kwan is a slacker twentysomething Asian-Canadian living in Vancouver who is about to embark on a modelling career when his life is suddenly derailed by two near-simultaneous events: the death of his filmmaker father, and the betrayal of his fiancee who has left him. Soon he meets Hadley, the half-sister he never knew existed--the result of his father's ex …

Crossings was Betty Lambert's only novel; published by Pulp Press in 1979, it was revolutionary for its frank and unsettling portrayal of Vicky, a female writer in Vancouver in the early 1960s, an educated and intelligent woman who struggles to come to terms with herself as she navigates an emotionally abusive relationship with Mik, a violent logger and ex-con. Their physical, often violent affair offers an honest and unflinching look at relationships and female suffering. The book caused a furo …

Chinatown, Vancouver, in the late 1930s and �40s provides the setting for this poignant first novel, told through the vivid and intense reminiscences of the three younger children of an immigrant family. They each experience a very different childhood, depending on age and sex, as they encounter the complexities of birth and death, love and hate, kinship and otherness. Mingling with the realities of Canada and the horror of war are the magic, ghosts, paper uncles and family secrets of Poh-P …