2012 BC Book Prizes Shortlist

Curious little Henry from the award-winning books When You Were Small and Where You Came From has a new question for his mother in this charming new picture book. "What was it like when you were small?" he asks. His mother proceeds to describe her adventures to him, all about when she was little, very little!

"[Walk Like a Man] is a touching and intimate look into one man's life, it also brings up bigger questions of fandom, of the public façade of celebrity, of the difference between art and artist." -- Exclaim.ca

A frank, funny, and inventive blend of biography, music criticism, and memoir told in thirteen tracks.

As he enters his sixties, Bruce Spring …

Warm, imaginative, and thoroughly original, this memoir intertwines the mysteries of trees with the defining moments in the life of novelist and essayist Theresa Kishkan. For Kishkan, trees are memory markers of life, and in this book she explores the presence of trees in nature, in culture and in her personal history. Naming each chapter for a par …

What if Demeter, the timeless fertility goddess of ancient Greek myth, slipped through a crack into the twenty-first century, shook off her ankle bracelets, corn tassels, and garlands, and began a tour of our improbable culture?Award-winning poet Susan McCaslin exercises the profound mother-daughter trauma forged in the Demeter-Persephone myth with …

Shortlisted for the Sheila A. Egoff Children’s Literature Prize

In a small prairie town like Argue, Saskatchewan, everyone knows everybody else’s business. Everyone knows that the Loney family has been barely hanging on -- the father, George, reduced to drink and despair since the loss of his farm and the death of his wife, Margaret. That the fo …

"A writer that truly believes that literature has the ability to change the world for the better, Geddes has produced a work well worth reading for both its content and its call to action." -- Quill & Quire

Set across Africa, this is a deeply engaging investigation of trauma, justice and the redemptive powers of imagination from an internationally a …

Shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Award

Governor General's Literary Award finalist Sharon Thesen's Oyama Pink Shale is a sly, self-directed, yet joyously emancipatory work. By animating and voicing various moments and selves -- indebted adult friend to artists, cold documentarian of a haunted sanatorium, engaged contemporary ticking off beauties, …

Set in the remote Kootenay Valley in western Canada, Once You Break a Knuckle tells stories of good people doing bad things: two bullied adolescents sabotage a rope swing, resulting in another boy’s death; a heartbroken young man refuses to warn his best friend about an approaching car; sons challenge fathers and break taboos. Crackling with ten …