Venetian

Literature & Fiction

Buday, Grant

History & Criticism

Oolichan Books

Rats, 16th century poets, and India on 3 bucks a day Golden Goa recounts Grant Buday’s travels in India by paralleling them with those of sixteenth-century Portuguese soldier and poet Luis de Camoens. Camoens, author of the Portuguese national epic The Lusiads, spent fourteen years in India in the 1500s. Between 1979 and 1999 Buday visited India five times in pursuit of the story of the Portuguese. A magical, exquisite narrative, reminiscent both of the travel writing of Paul Bowles and Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family, this book takes you to the island of Diu, won by the Portuguese from the navy of Suleiman the Magnificent. Visiting Goa, Buday meets the Rodrigues family, people who inhabit a two-hundred-year-old house full of history and rats. (Goa was once the jewel in the crown of the Portuguese Empire, and the saying went that he who had seen Goa need not see Lisbon.) Throughout his journeys Buday encounters those who wish the Portuguese would come back and those who are very glad they’re gone. A comic, vivid, and moving story, Golden Goa takes you from Darjeeling in the east, to Jaisalmer in the west, to Cochin in the south. It explores Mother Teresa’s Calcutta, the Dalai Lama’s Dharamsala, and the Poona of Bhagwan Sri Rajneesh. Along the way, Buday is train wrecked, rat bit, badgered, and ripped off. Mostly, though, he’s delighted.

Golden Goa

Travel

Asia

ECW Press

?Bankruptcy and a bad back have driven 50-year-old Willie LeMat from a successful career as a building contractor into a grow-op. He is convinced that in just two years he can realize his dream of buying an apple orchard and become a gentleman farmer. But his high hopes are soon dashed when his first marijuana crop is stolen. How did the thieves know where and when to strike? The only ones who know he is running a grow-op are his girlfriend, daughter, and ex-mother-in-law who all rely on him financially, as well as the landlord who is charging him a usurious rent. His girlfriend Carmen is a painter who paints one thing only: self-portraits. His daughter Angela recently returned from Asia pregnant by a Burmese monk. His ex-mother-in-law Juliet is a former bombshell who has never worked a day in her life. His landlord Rollo is a thief and a conman. Willie is terrified of being abandoned if he can’t keep buying their love and loyalty. Locked into this self-imposed slavery, he grows another crop even as he fears the poachers are waiting to pounce again. Rootbound follows one man’s search for self-esteem in a world that means to keep him in self-doubt.

Rootbound

Contemporary

a misFit book

Six-year-old Jack Klein’s first day of school is also a day of radical changes: Jack’s mother Lorraine learns that her husband, Ray, is having an affair, and that her secret love, Antoine Gaudin, the 65-year-old boarder in the basement, has committed suicide, leaving behind a suitcase full of money and a sack of gold teeth. Lorraine’s decision about what to do about the money, the gold teeth, and Ray’s infidelity will forever change her life and her family. This briskly paced, black-comic tale moves seamlessly between the distinct but overlapping worlds of a confused child, a mother immersed in 1960s youth culture, and a father who worships the fading Rat Pack and the indulgences it represents.

A Sack of Teeth

Humor & Satire

Raincoast Books

Art critic Clement Greenberg, champion of abstract expressionism, is more interested in silencing his rival Harold Rosenberg than with the threat of nuclear destruction.Greenberg is driving from New York to the Emma Lake artist colony in Saskatchewan, where he intends to silence Rosenberg once and for all. With him is infamous Marxist Louis Althusser, who escaped prosecution for strangling his wife in France on an insanity plea. Althusser is heading to a Saskatchewan hospital for LSD therapy.Pursuing them is Jean Claude Piche, a veteran of the conflicts in Indochina and Algeria, contracted to execute Althusser for the unpunished murder.The 1950s were Greenberg's decade. Yet by 1962, everywhere Greenberg looks he is bedevilled by Andy Warhol's Campbell Soup cans, just as everywhere Althusser looks he sees capitalist decay.Jean Claude catches Greenberg and Althusser at Niagara Falls. The enigmatic arch patriot Swen catches all three in North Dakota. Convinced that they are communist subversives, Swen imprisons and interrogates them even as, hour by hour, minute by minute, Khrushchev and Kennedy threaten to launch World War III.An absurdist romp, Atomic Road charts its own course between historical veracity, fictional invention, and the unfettered egotism of two mad intellectuals.

Atomic Road

Genre Fiction

Anvil Press

After ten years the Trojan War is at a deadlock. Both sides are exhausted, and Odysseus, cleverest of men, wants more than anything to return to Ithaka and his wife and son and orange grove. He aches for home, but not without a certain fear that he will return a stranger to the son he hasn't seen in ten years. When Agamemnon, King of the Greeks, asks Odysseus to devise a scheme to settle the conflict once and for all, Odysseus comes up with the idea of the great horse. No Trojan, he thinks, can resist a magnificent horse. Yet many think the idea mad. The comic and iconoclastic Odysseus will have more than his ingenuity tested before he can set sail for home. This deeply imagined and exquisitely written novel details the last days of the Trojan War. Told from Odysseus' perspective, it fleshes out the myth and mystery of one of the greatest stories in the Western canon.

Dragonflies

Literary

Biblioasis

Finalist for the 2021 BC and Yukon Book Prizes' Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize and the 2021 City of Victoria Butler Book Prize "Meticulously researched and vividly drawn, Orphans of Empire brings to life the half-forgotten world of early British Columbia. This is an immersive, shimmering novel." --Steven Price, author of #1 nationally bestselling By Gaslight and Giller-shortlisted Lampedusa In Grant Buday's new novel, three captivating stories intertwine at the site of the New Brighton Hotel on the shores of Burrard Inlet. In 1858 the serious and devoted Sir Richard Clement Moody receives the commission of a lifetime when he is sent to help establish "a second England"--what is now British Columbia. In 1865 Frisadie, an eighteen-year-old Kanaka housemaid, who is more entrepreneur than ingénue, arrives in New Brighton from Hawaii. She convinces Maxie Michaud to purchase the hotel with her, and it soon becomes the toast of the inlet. In 1885 Henry Fannin, a young, curious embalmer and magnetism devotee, having struck out in London and San Francisco, arrives in New Brighton and promptly falls in love with a tragic woman he hears crying on his first night at the hotel. Endearing, funny, and highly evocative of time and place, Orphans of Empire celebrates those living in the shadow of history's supposed heroes, their private struggles and personal agendas. Readers who loved Michael Crummey's Galore and Eowyn Ivey's To the Bright Edge of the World, will love this vivid novel of arrivals that prods at the ethics of settlement.

Orphans of Empire: A Novel

Touchwood Editions

Fiction. Kobzar Literary Award, Finalist. Eric Hoffer Award, Shortlist. City of Victoria Book Prize, Finalist. Art, love, and history furnish the setting in this tale of fate and destiny. Set in Vancouver in 1962, we follow Cyril Andrachuk, son of immigrant parents from the former Ukraine, as he makes his way from high school to menial labour jobs, from first love to first heartbreak, from sibling rivalry to malicious family betrayal. Cyril is the only Canadian-born member of the Andrachuk family, his parents and older brother having survived the Holodomor, Stalin's systematic starving of the Ukraine in the 1930s during which two million people died. Cyril's mother carries the scars and memories of a past she can't let go of; she mourns the early death of her husband and feels responsible for the malnourished, brittle bones of her eldest son, Paul. Cyril is a mystery to her: he wants to be an artist—he draws incessantly and talks about going to art school. He draws his late father's tools—saws, drills, hammers, wrenches, everything. When Cyril produces a series of large commemorative "Stalin stamps" his mother questions her son's insensitivity; when an act of impassioned violence erupts in the house, it is Cyril's sanity that is called into question. The Delusionist is a darkly comic novel about love, loss, creativity, and coming to terms with the horrors of history. "Subtle and elegant, his account of one's man's stumble-filled movement toward his fate commands attention and gives readers new ways to comprehend the process of maturation."—The Vancouver Sun "Buday captures the ambiance of 1962 Vancouver like an archaeologist opening a time capsule..."—John Moore, BC BookWorld "...a realistically uplifting portrayal of a child of immigrants who is trying to pull himself out of a rut."—The Globe and Mail

The Delusionist

Grant Buday's new novel is an eccentric coming-of-age story that captures the late-Victorian fascination with ancient Egypt, auras, and the afterlife. Smart, stubborn, and forthright Pearl Greyland-Smith is nine years old when we first meet her, in 1882. She lives with her widowed mother, Florence, in Victoria's James Bay neighbourhood. Pearl's father was a Hussar who died in Afghanistan, or that's what Florence has always told Pearl. But when an Irish woman named Cassidy arrives at their door and addresses Florence as Sinead, Pearl begins to realize she may not know very much about her origins at all. An avid reader with a rich inner life, as Pearl grows up she nonetheless confronts the scarcity of choices available to women. Yet while lacking in certain amenities, Pearl and Florence's days are anything but dull, populated by characters easily at home in a Dickens novel: the earnest and enigmatic amateur scientist Charles Gloster, their bawdy, theosophist housemaid Carpy, inspector Osmo Beattie, and imperialist newspaper columnist Harry Hearne. Then a fateful encounter at a solstice fête throws Pearl's whole future into question. This delightful coming-of-age story, imbued with the Victorian fascination for auras and the afterlife, will appeal to readers of Patrick DeWitt and Eleanor Catton. Once again Grant Buday has turned distant West Coast history upside down and created a vivid world intimately relevant to us today.

In the Belly of the Sphinx: A Novel

British & Irish

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