news | Wednesday September 5, 2018

The first of our Fall list: Almost Islands and Around Her

Photo of two books, Almost Islands and Around Her, taken in a parkette

The crisp air of fall is upon us here in Vancouver – and we’re very excited to announce that the first of our Fall books have arrived in house!

Almost Islands is a powerful memoir of Stephen Collis’s friendship with legendary Canadian poet, broadcaster, and painter Phyllis Webb – now in her nineties and long enveloped in silence. In a series of extended poetic, political, and philosophical digressions, the book meditates on literary ambition and failure, poetry and politics, choice and chance, location, colonization, and climate change – the struggle that is writing, and the end of writing.

Around Her, written by Sophie Bienvenu and translated by Rhonda Mullins, filters twenty years in the lives of Florence Gaudreault and her estranged son, Adrien, through the prism of twenty characters who have crossed their paths. Replete with emotional twists and turns, the book probes the failures and hopes of whole segements of society – the young, the old, families, couples, lonely souls – and reveals the proximity of past traumas, showing the bonds that unite us. Michel Tremblay calls it “absolutely wonderful.”

Order your copies of Almost Islands and Around Her today!