BC Books From the Mainland/Southwest

Sun Belt's collaborative work of fiction is a genre-defying chronicle of a tar sands company town. Drawing from an array of invented sources such as journals, film transcripts, environmental studies and police reports, Cabalcor charts the rise and fall of a mythical boomtown that, within the span of a century, becomes a desert wasteland.

The multi-layered narrative is woven together by an extraordinary blend of texts, both black and white and colour images, and a full downloadable album of Sun Be …

ReLit Long Shortlist, 2015

Savour is the follow-up to Bateman’s award-winning debut novel, Nondescript Rambunctious, and the second book in a trilogy about a dark, suspected serial killer named Oliver. Savour retains the dark threads of sociopathic depravity that ran through the debut novel, but is once again tempered with a tender ray of humanity. Lizzy is streetwise, yet fragile, and her desperate journey is both uplifting and heartbreaking.

Lizzy lives in the shadier part of London, far from …

Reissued as part of Anvil Press's Lost BC Literature series

Set in Vancouver in the mid-1960s, Mirror on the Floor focuses on one summer in the life of UBC grad student Bob Small and his roommate, George Delsing.

They spend their time carousing the downtown eastside and engaging in conversations with the old-timers—dockworkers, unemployed loggers, and retired seamen. They study, smoke cigarettes, endure tedious summer jobs, bombard one another with philosophical banter, and strike out on near ni …

Finalist, Bill Duthie Booksellers' Choice Award (BC Book Prizes), 2016

#1 on the BC Bestseller List

Since 2005, nearly 9,000 demo permits for residential buildings have been issued in Vancouver. An average of three houses a day are torn down, many of them original homes built for the middle and working class in the 1920s, '30s and '40s. Very few are deemed significant enough to earn the protection of a heritage designation, but they are part of our heritage nonetheless and their demolition is not …

A wide-ranging anthology of Asian Canadian literature to celebrate 20 years of Ricepaper.

2015 marks the 20th anniversary of Ricepaper magazine, a pioneering periodical devoted to Asian-Canadian writing. Over the years, Ricepaper's focus has shifted from predominantly arts and culture reporting to the publication of original literature; as such, it has both witnessed and cultivated the maturation of an Asian-Canadian literary tradition; indeed, many of today's most acclaimed Asian-Canadian writer …

The untold story behind some of Vancouver's notorious unsolved murder cases.

Finalist, Bill Duthie Booksellers' Choice Award (BC Book Prizes)

While Vancouver is much loved by tourists and locals alike for its spectacular natural scenery and diverse culture, behind that facade lurks a violent past. Cold Case Vancouver takes a look at the city's disreputable side by revisiting some of its infamous cold murder cases from 1944 to 1996.

There are literally hundreds of murders that remain unsolved in Va …

A Globe 100 Best Book of the Year

Lambda Literary Award winner

The debut book by Hasan Namir is a revelatory novel about being queer and Muslim, set in war-torn Iraq in 2003. Ramy is a closeted university student whose parents have died, and who lives under the close scrutiny of his strict brother and sister-in-law. They exert pressure on him to find a wife, leaving him anguished and struggling to find a balance between his sexuality, religion, and culture. Desperate for counsel, he seeks the adv …

New edition of Michael Turner's seminal 1995 poetry collection, including a new essay by the author.

When Michael Turner's Kingsway was published in 1995, critics and readers were either effusive in their praise or confounded by the book's unwillingness to adhere to traditional poetry structures. In this collection of linked poems that evolve around Kingsway, Vancouver's oldest thoroughfare that cuts diagonally across the city, the single-stanza poems approximate city blocks, as diverse and compl …