Category Archives: Reviews of the written word

Novel captures effects of genocide

The Imposter Bride
By Nancy Richler
Harper Collins, 360 pages, $29.99

Reviewed by Chris Fox

Nancy Richler’s The Imposter Bride is a haunting, often beautiful, read. It offers history and insight into human relations as it explores how the two shape each other in this story of one woman’s search for the mother who left her, as an infant, to be raised by her father and his family.

Most of the novel, Richler’s third, is told from the perspective of this woman, Ruth, as she grows up in the warm embrace of the Jewish immigrant family that her mother, posing as Lily Kramer, married into before fleeing Montreal for Canada’s hinterland to protect herself. Little Ruthie is hurt by her mother’s abandonment, which her father cannot even begin to explain. At thirteen, at a family Seder, she asks why this mother, whose periodic gift of stones seems to both affirm and to grieve their bond, is not there with them. When her father answers that they “really don’t know,” Ruthie sets the course that she will run when she has become Ruth, an experienced mother herself: “Then maybe I’ll have to find her and ask her.”

This primary narrative unearths itself almost like a mystery while Ruth’s seeking also provides the raison d’être for a layered narrative, based in Montréal, but also reaching back to Amsterdam, Poland, and Palestine during and after WWII. In particular, Richler’s deft development of the back-story of Ruthie’s two grandmother figures, which are brought together, initially, by the imposter bride, is heart-warming. Initially, both are quite unappealing characters, but as they befriend each other and share their stories, readers will find themselves befriending them, too.

Richler’s rich tapestry of characters allows readers to share several diverse stories of Jews who, like the grandmothers, escaped Europe earlier to settle in Montréal, as well as immigrants like Ruth’s mother, who came later and is beginning again, post Second World War, bereft of relations, with only a stolen identity and her dream of “Canada.” Her first impressions of Canada’s endless “dark forest” and towns that are “mere specks in the eye of the desolation that surrounded them” recall accounts by Susannah Moodie a century before and also mirror the impossible losses that haunt “Lily” and underwrite the novel as a whole. In Ruth, and her children, we see Canadian Jews discovering their heritage in order to live more fully in the present. This makes The Imposter Bride an excellent springboard for consideration of the effects of war and attempted genocide and how these horrors distort individual lives and reverberate through generations. Richler’s novel is filled with adroit and apposite prose that, paradoxically, holds its own stone, a respectful silence, at its heart.

Chris Fox is a Victoria writer who recently completed her PhD in English.

Poet’s first book brave and fierce

1996
By Sara Peters
House of Anansi, 65 pages, $19.95

Reviewed by Jenny Boychuk

Sometimes you need a poet who will lead you into the dark woods without promising to bring you back to safety again. Sometimes you need a poet who will show you the decomposing bear at the edge of the river—and the kids placing red gumdrops along its spine.

Sara Peters is this poet, and this exceptionally brave and fierce first collection left me shaken. Every poem is surprising, though Peters never uses the same trick twice. Often I found myself holding my breath for multiple poems at a time before she turned the knife in my gut. Peters was born in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. She is a graduate of the MFA program at Boston University and was a Stegner fellow at Stanford University from 2010 to 2012.

The first poem, “Babysitters,” sets an appropriately eerie and mysterious tone for the collection. At the end of the poem, I realized the rest of the book would consist of things parents would never talk about in front of their children.

A foreshadowing:

. . . But when she thinks herself
alone, you hear back seat of the car, then
with a trench knife, in the orchard. Secrets thud
like June bugs against screens,
and all you have to do is let them in.

The collection consists of six sections with five poems each, which provides a pleasing sort of symmetrical reading experience. Peters’ controlled lines work best when they slowly release distilled moments and the rhythms provide an almost incantatory effect:

She didn’t mean to braid the horses’ manes and tails
hundreds of times with so much élan—French, four-stranded—

but up was the only unoccupied direction,
so how else to get there? And always

these questions: Who set those fires?
Who broke those mirrors? Is that your blood?

Peters’ poems often have narratives and through them she tells stories of teenage nostalgia, physical attraction, heartbreak, family, religion, nature and the body wearing down. She is skilled with a knife and handles heavy topics with impressive emotional restraint.

From “Bionic”:

My brother’s twenty-two and therefore believes he’s bionic.
He’s home from school,
he’s supposed to look after our mother for the week.
She’s senile and probably dying.
He’s cruel but his cruelty’s probably temporary.

He’s dressed her in a T-shirt that says
I kill everything I fuck // I fuck everything I kill.
She stares into a bowl of cornflake milk;
I carefully cover my breakfast in ketchup.

My brother is funny and blunt.
Whenever I say something sentimental,
or talk—for example—about the ocean,
he says, You know what?
You should write a poem about that.

While there were points where I thought Peters tried to tackle too much within a poem, I won’t soon forget the haunting details and alarming imagery. This is a collection of secrets, a photo album of things not meant to be photographed—and we should be grateful for the chance to look.

 

Jenny Boychuk has just completed her BFA and is thinking about her future.

Québecoise fable charms reader

The Douglas Notebooks
By Christine Eddie, translated by Sheila Fischman
Goose Lane Press, 178 pages,  $19.95

Reviewed by Arleen Paré

Charming is the word. The Douglas Notebooks is a charming story captured in a small, charming book. Fable-like and bitter-sweet, the narrative ends on page 160; the last eighteen pages constitute a useful set of endnotes entitled “Credits (in order of appearance).” Despite its size, Notebooks packs an ambitious punch. It not only tells the magical story of Douglas and Éléna, it also critiques a period of historical resource, urban and social development, describing the effects of human greed. At the same time it reveals the effects of the Holocaust on one of the main characters. None of the topics is out of place in this tale; they fit together to complete a very satisfactory read.

In addition to Christine Eddie’s deft integration of characters, plot and history, she seduces the reader with language. She writes, “After his second winter in the woods, loneliness fell on Romain like a bear on a butterfly,” using imagery so arresting that the reader is able to absorb the full weight of his sadness. In another chapter, Éléna reassures Douglas (aka Romain) that she loves him despite his difficult childhood by saying, “I would have liked you even if you were an earthquake.” Later, in the city, “the buildings pour their staircases onto the sidewalks.” This translation by Sheila Fischman, a well-established, award-winning Québecoise translator, is so convincing one could easily imagine it was originally written in English, except that the language is curiously heightened, enriched by a generous sprinkling of fresh poetic idioms.

The two romantic characters are misfits who find each other in a thick forest. They triumph over mean family backgrounds and physical challenges. Although the whole book is sweet (and I mean that only in the best sense of the word), the beginning is the sweetest and most poetic part of the book. I wanted it to go on and on–like a fairytale. But the story divides in two. Tragedy, also known as reality, crashes into their idyllic home. The fallout, the rest of the story, revolves around Rose, the daughter of Douglas and Éléna.

It is a fable, a fairytale with a substantial measure of contemporary social criticism. Like a good fairytale, it is hard to determine exactly where it takes place, which should make it solidly universal. And although it might be universal, somehow the place is important. I wanted to know where the story was happening. The place names are mainly French; I kept, picturing small villages on the north shore of the St. Lawrence River. This is part of the mystery. Nevertheless, wherever it really does take place, it is well worth the read.

Arleen Paré is a Victoria writer whose forthcoming book of poetry, Lake of Two Mountains, will be released by Brick Books in Spring 2014.

Vancouver’s Litany thrills audience

Litany Reading Series
Gallery Gachet,  Vancouver
Sunday, April 7

Reviewed by Dorothy June Fraser

The first Litany Reading of the year (back in January) was so well-attended it almost burst the small comfy surroundings of the Rhizome Cafe on E. Broadway in Vancouver. So well-attended that I couldn’t get in.  On April 7, Gallery Gachet on Cordova offered a larger space to house the queer reading series.  This larger-but-still-packed event was certainly a success for co-hosts Leah Horlick and Esther McPhee, both graduate students with the University of British Columbia’s creative writing department.

Horlick and I chatted briefly after the evening had wound down about the influences on the creators and the origin of the event. The series itself takes its name from Audre Lorde’s poem, “A Litany for Survival.” When co-creators McPhee and Horlick noticed a dearth of queer, anti-oppressive spaces and readings in Vancouver (with few exceptions, notably the thrilLITERATE series which was organized by Vancouver-based queer author Amber Dawn from 2007 to 2012), the two engineered the Litany reading series .

The evening introductions started with pronoun usage, identity and biography. Readers laid bare their histories in this safe space and were appreciated for exactly the person they identify as, whether the pronoun be she, he, or they. The showcase of five readers, with Adam Douba unfortunately out sick, contributed life experiences that most of the audience could relate to. First reader, Fayza Bundalli, explored rites of passage through coming out. Her frank, embodied performance of queer creative non-fiction was an excellent introduction to the Litany atmosphere. Kiran Sunar’s unfinished manuscript work about brown family queerness and diasporic existence in the Fraser Valley was impassioned poetry trapped in prose sentences. Nat Marshik’s short poems were sweet honey in my ears, a quick whisper of love affairs. Christina Cooke’s evocative short fiction brought sense memories of “home” into the gallery. The featured reader, Jacks McNamara, a Bay Area genderqueer artist, brought the house down with sexy queerotica. Jacks cooed short, punctuated bursts of radiant orgasm. I adored the high these writers gave me, and I floated out of the Gachet.

The next Vancouver reading will occur some time this summer. Check Facebook or Tumblr for updates.

Dorothy June Fraser is an MA History in Art student at UVic and the online gallery curator for Plenitude Magazine.

 

Author creates credible teen character

The New Normal
By Ashley Little
Orca Book Publishers,  222 pages, $12.95
 
Reviewed by Marcie Gray

Alberta writer Ashley Little really knows how to make an entrance.

Her first novel for young adults, The New Normal, jumps right into the crisis at hand: the main character, Tamar, is shedding. She’s 16 and is losing her hair–and not just the hair on her head. It’s falling out everywhere, from her private parts to her eyelashes. I say “private parts,” but she uses more graphic language. The first page is a bit of a shock for me, a mother who is thinking about whether this book is something I’d like my daughter to read when she hits her teens. I’m used to the softer, safer language of leading female characters in books like The Hunger Games and Twilight. Bella would never talk about her pubic hair. Hell, her relationship with the gentleman vampire Edward is so sanitized that even now I can’t visualize them naked.

Little has no problem exposing her character, but she doesn’t spend much time exploring why Tamar is becoming a “chrome dome.” It might be a rare disease. It might be from stress, as Tamar’s younger sisters recently died in a car crash, leaving her parents devastated.  The story isn’t about the mystery of the hair loss; rather, it’s about how Tamar deals with it. This quest broadens as she finds herself trying to make peace with her dead sisters and make whole her family once again.

The writing is clean and conversational; the book reads like a diary, as we listen to Tamar confessing her story in first person. At times the logic is a bit faulty, and the author, perhaps trying to show just how tenacious Tamar is, gives her an extra challenge–an unnecessary challenge, I think. But otherwise there’s not much to trim, as Little weaves tight, spare pictures. In one chapter, the writing is so vivid and piercing that you are in the room, having an acupuncture needle pulled out of your back with a “sharp sucking sound.”  No surprise that this visit to a practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine began as a short story; the author later expanded it into the current novel. It shows that with close editing, Little’s writing truly shines.

Ultimately, I ask myself whether this book is one I’d pass on to my daughter, and there’s no doubt I would. Tamar shows incredible resilience, and that’s the one quality I think our kids need today as they enter the sometimes scary and always challenging world of high school. Although Tamar is, at times, too resilient to be believable (I just can’t buy the scene where she’s ready to skip the wig and go bald to the prom), she still comes across as an authentic character. She is a teen who tries, risks, fails, succeeds, and yes, swears. For a role model, I’d pick her over Bella any day.

Marcie Gray acquired her appreciation for spare, conversational writing as a reporter and producer for CBC Radio. Today she’s at work on her own young adult novel.

 

Book showcases local chefs, ingredients

On the Flavour Trail; Recipes by Island Chefs’ Collaborative
Edited by Christabel Padmore,
Touch Wood Editions, 184 pages, $29.95

Reviewed by Candace Fertile

The richness in variety and flavour of locally sourced food on and around Vancouver Island is undeniable. The Island Chefs’ Collaborative (ICC) was founded in 1999 to promote sustainable local production, and this cookbook is a lovely homage to what is in our backyards (literally and figuratively). The editor, Christabel Padmore, invites readers to learn more about the ICC by checking out its website.

The nineteen contributors to this volume are all chefs dedicated to creating tasty dishes with local ingredients. The recipes cover a wide range of foods and are organized by where the main components come from: sea, orchard, forest, field, and farm. As food writer Don Genova notes in the Foreword, the chefs are continually working on behalf of local food: “Without exception they have always been generous with their time and their knowledge and, above all,  their willingness to take part in fundraising efforts that protect, defend and promote the framers, fishers, foragers and producers who provide the excellent ingredients they use towards achieving their daily goal of pleasing our palates.” Buying this book and using the ingredients of the recipes helps this organization and, by extension, anyone with a love of local food.

As can be expected, food from the sea plays a large role in this book with such delicious-looking recipes as Porcini Crusted Halibut (Dwayne MacIsaac) and Thai-Flavoured Spot Prawn Bisque (Bill Jones). Someone who likes to get finicky with food will enjoy making Pumpkin and Side Stripe Shrimp Stuffed Phyllo Parcels (Cosmo Meens), but the time-challenged will find many possibilities in this volume. The very first recipe, Cosmo Meens’ Crab and Rockfish Cakes with Caper, Red Onion and Preserved Lemon Aioli, will set taste buds aflutter, and Meens’s precise directions makes this recipe doable for a variety of home chefs.

Cory Pelan’s Braised Pork Cheeks with Potato Gnocchi is another complex but meticulously explained dish that looks terrific, and the book includes relatively easy recipes such as James McClellan’s Meatloaf that clearly depends on specific ingredients such as Moonstruck Beddis Blue cheese and Quist Farms lean ground beef for its impact. Heidi Fink’s Roasted Green Bean Crostini is easy and shows the genius of roasting a vegetable for maximum flavour. Some recipes need a bit more precision. Anna Hunt’s Kale and Bacon Pie looks yummy, but how much kale is “two bunches” Fortunately, the picture of this pie gives a sense of what it should like when finished.

The book is lavishly illustrated with photographs of food, but many of the pictures are of the ingredients in the before state or have nothing to do with the recipes. If a recipe book has pictures, it’s helpful if they are of the finished dish or a complicated step. The photos are decorative rather than practical.

It’s critical to remember that Vancouver Island is an island. It’s huge, and it has abundant food sources. But we must nurture and protect those sources, and the Island Chefs’ Collaborative is certainly doing its part to draw attention to nutritious and delicious local food.

Quirky characters take to the road

South of Elfrida
By Holley Rubinsky
Brindle & Glass, 231 pages, $19.95

Reviewed by Judy LeBlanc

The characters in Holley Rubinsky’s fourth book (and second collection of short stories) are simultaneously ordinary and quirky, predatory and loving. If you’ve ever been squished between motor homes in a roadside campground heading south, you’ve maybe shared a drink with them and surprised yourself with how much you’ve revealed about your life, while doves and grackles cavort nearby and small pets slink between your legs. In these stories, misfits and the wounded, often in the guise of aging independent single women unshackled from a lifetime’s worth of loss, haul their homes on trailer hitches and live temporarily in RV parks and rented apartments, usually in Arizona.

In the collection’s most touching story,“ Desert Dreams,” Nina, grieving her husband’s death and facing her mother’s imminent passing, takes to the road with a camper trailer. “The burden of being followed everywhere by her own home is an inescapable preoccupation too; for long moments she hurts less about Frank.”

Though her concerns may rest with matters of the heart, Rubinsky’s stories are unsentimental, edged with farce and sprinkled with capricious detail: an electric palm tree and a Chihuahua with his own sequined director’s chair. In “The Compact,” Sally, idling in a RV park for six months of the year, cherishes the tiny and not so tiny secrets she keeps from her boorish flag-waving, bigoted husband: her second glass of wine, the spit in the meatloaf, the compact in which she hides the ashes from the black baby she aborted in the early days of their marriage. Even Rubinsky’s darker humour does not so much horrify as hearten; I am left believing in the redemptive power of life’s odd miscalculated moments.

An undercurrent of tension in these stories suggests that unmoored from the safety of the familiar we are vulnerable to the predator, not just in the natures of others but also in our own. This is particularly evident in the first three stories, the strongest in the collection. In a chilling irony, a child molester encloses baby turtles for their safety, a woman walks willingly into a pen of frenzied emus and in the title story the “hawk man . . .bags the birds, each one a bride. She recognizes the intensity in him, the coldness.”

In a literary world where clever verbiage and narrative sleight-of-hand is too often celebrated over substance, Rubinsky’s voice is wise and straight-up. In uncomplicated prose with a depth that knows in the end we are all travellers, she explores the impermanence of things: the ethereal quality of desert light, the elusive nature of time and reality. Barb, who has run into trouble at the border thinks, “people camping a night here, a week there, don’t care about accuracy or truth.” In “Desert Dreams” a dying Miriam comforts herself and her peers by pretending she has seen “the special spark at the end, a flash of green as the sun disappears over the horizon.”

 

Judy LeBlanc writes fiction and has recently completed her MFA at the University of Victoria.

Long-silent poet’s voice surprises

Tilt
By E. Blagrave,
Cormorant Books, 61 pages, $18

Reviewed by Isa Milman

There is a wonderful, literal, backstory to this first book of poetry by E. Blagrave, who is herself somewhat of a mystery. Thirteen of these poems were first published in one issue of The Fiddlehead in 1973, when the author was a young woman. Soon after, she disappeared from print for more than thirty years. She’s now returned, having gone full circle, with this collection.

My usual approach to poetry is visual, but this collection came in through my ears. What a happy surprise. I heard E.’s young voice, and her mature voice, but couldn’t always distinguish which voice was speaking. Another happy surprise. Her opening poem rang in like a folk song, with lyrics delicate yet sharp and moody, and set the stage for what was to come. Reading her book, I conjured Jethro Tull, Judy Collins, and Sting in his early days, singing about the golden sun and fields of barley. He was fairer than corn growing/ and brighter by far than the dawn. I found myself moving from past to present, not sure which tense to dwell in.

As in the heady heart-break of the best folk songs, love is finely rendered in these poems, but slippery, not easy to hold. E. points to a laburnum’s flowery cascade and tells us:

our love is left to time,
to braid the yellow clusters up;
to give to me what isn’t mine.

E. extends her hand and invites us to saddle up for a ride, to join her in a meadow, by a lake, or to lie down with her in her great-grandfather’s orchard, and observe the rows of apple trees: We take comfort in such precision. It gives us an inkling of our situation.

And such is our situation. Joy is the natural world, but also uneasiness in its frightening fragility. The man-made world is less secure, and often a source of discomfort. In “You are So Alone” . . . the buildings are chained/and have in them lonely places. Better to lie in the orchard.

I appreciate her bijou poems, so spare, so evocative:

Here lie the agencies
.         of my heart:
The still lake
.         and small fish
.        simmering therein,
the sun in my fist,
the drowned world
and all that spins.

Toward the close of her collection, E. prepares us for winter with the beauty of

November:

The little tree
was butter-yellow,
was fall.
Fall still graced my window.
After a while the leaves
turned black at the edges
like a blighted rose,
and frost was on the roofs
in the morning.
Then the leaves fell
and winter closed the door.

The record has stopped spinning on the turntable. I pick up E.’s volume and listen again. It’s even better the second time around.

Isa Milman is a poet and visual artist who has called Victoria home for the last sixteen years. Her first two poetry collections have each won the Canadian Jewish Book Award for Poetry. Her new collection, Something Small to Carry Home, was recently released.

 

 

Author takes risks with nonfiction

Rosina: The Midwife
By Jessica Kluthe
Brindle and Glass, 216 pages, $19.95
E-book, $14.95

Reviewed by Lynne Bowen

Rosina, the midwife is a true account of the life of an Italian woman from the region of Calabria. Rosinaʼs young and modern great, great granddaughter, Jessica Kluthe, is the author.
 Kluthe, who has an MFA in Writing from the University of Victoria, lives in Edmonton. This is her first book.

In writing the book, Kluthe pushes against the definition of nonfiction. In parts of the story where she could not know what Rosina was thinking or doing, Kluthe enhances the narrative with invention. But she does it by signaling to the reader that what follows is what she has imagined.

When Rosina the midwife walks through the Calabrian night to deliver a baby, we are with her because Kluthe has used her knowledge of the woman and the terrain to imagine what it must have been like:

She knows the ground well, even in the dark. She slows down around the spots where rotting roots have left holes and takes wider strides over a nettle patch; her legs are bare beneath her gown.

Kluthe enhances the narrative with the knowledge that years of doing research and listening to family stories has given her about her ancestor whose lonely but useful life is now mostly unknowable.

There is no song to help me feel her, no voice to remind me of hers. There is no scent, no texture. No time of day.

In language that is spare and breathtakingly beautiful, Kluthe has written a book which carves new paths for literary nonfiction to follow.

I confess that I brought a bias to the reading of the book: I had taught creative nonfiction writing for several years and believed that the audience for nonfiction wants to know that all the events in the book really happened. But Klutheʼs book meets with my approval, which says more about the chances she takes and the evolution of nonfiction writing, than about the validity of my bias.

I also came to this book having spent eleven years researching and writing about Italy and the people who were forced to leave it. From the perspective of a non-Italian at least, I knew the topic of Italian emigration well. Now, having read Rosina, the midwife, I know more about the few who were left behind and I understand more about the emigrants and their descendants.

Kluthe is artful in the way she handles time and sequence as she navigates between her own and her ancestorʼs stories. She bravely reveals her own tragedies in moving detail and is equally brave in her insistence that her relatives help her in her efforts to fill in the blanks in the familyʼs past. The fact that she travelled to Calabria with her grandfather and her uncle — two additional generations of her family, one able to speak Italian, the other Calabrese — makes a true but inadvertent statement about the changes emigration causes in families.

The reader is in Calabria with Rosina at a time when wheat still grows in the fields and vines still bear fruit, but wretched poverty is driving the people away. And the reader is in Calabria with Kluthe a century later when the soil will not hold water and Rosinaʼs people have died or have left Italy for another part of the world.

Lynne Bowen is a Nanaimo writer; her latest book is Whoever Gives Us Bread: The Story of Italians in British Columbia.

First novel explores life’s mysteries

Belinda’s Rings
By Corinna Chong
NeWest Press, 264 pages, $19.95

Reviewed by Yasuko Thanh

Corinna Chong’s first novel, Belinda’s Rings, introduces us to a quirky, idiosyncratic family–but aren’t they all when you scratch below the surface?

Chong, who was born in Calgary but now lives in Kelowna, BC, has written a readable novel about what lies beneath, what the eye can’t see. Ostensibly, it’s about a mother, father, and three children. But the novel is also about the power of imagination, and the fictions we maintain about ourselves, in order to keep on being the people we are.

The novel’s point of view alternates between third- and first-person. Belinda, the mother, has been carrying all her family’s responsibilities. Her daughter Grace (who prefers to be called Gray) intuits that she’ll one day “get tired of being a mother to everyone.”

“You don’t need to go to a special place to prove you’re a good person,” Belinda claims. But she nevertheless abandons her three children and escapes to England, to study crop circles near the town where she was born.

Gray and Belinda, polarized as they might seem at first glance, are united by the desire to believe the impossible. They are dying to be amazed.

Deep sea life attracts Gray. Squid are fascinating as sunken treasures in the ocean’s depths. Belinda’s attraction is to crop circles. And UFOs. She finds a pseudo-peace looking for patterns precisely in those places the skeptics claim none exist. In fact, she clings to her illusions for survival. She’s been living a lie, convincing herself of her perfect marriage and a happy family.

Chong writes: “She had the ability to imagine feelings into being; if she wanted romance, she could convince herself that Burger King on a Saturday night was unconventional and sweetly modest.  In a way, it was empowering.” And it is empowering to tell yourself what you need to hear in order to get up in the morning.  Belinda tells herself her reasons for leaving her children (in the care of an unstable father) are “noble.”  She’s on “a scientific expedition . . . focused on issues far more consequential than the trifles of domestic life.”  In a van on her way to investigate a crop circle with fellow rag-tag “researchers,” she tells no one she has children back home. What if someone assumes her children are “her world”?

The image of a child’s grave lies at the heart of Chong’s novel. The image is delicate and transient–beautiful in the way all mortal things are.  Scholars puzzle over its purpose at the center of a crumbling wooden monument. Belinda’s lost connections give her more in common with her daughter than she might like.

Love is a feat of the imagination, Chong seems to say. And, as with all games of make believe, perhaps she’s also saying its strength lies in how hard you’re willing to fight for the belief. If you love reading about mothers and daughters, this is a book for you.

Yasuko Thanh has been short-listed for this year’s BC Book Prize in fiction.