From memoirs to historical fiction, these UVic grads are crafting award-winning stories
Images via Goodreads, collage by Sabina Mendoza.
Looking for some Canadian authors to add to your TBR pile? Whether you’re a poetry lover, a fan of fiction, or only read non-fiction, try these six books by UVic grads.
Monkey Beach by Eden Robinson (UVic BFA ‘92)
When seventeen year old Jimmy Hill goes missing at sea, his family and community are left to piece together what happened. Monkey Beach follows Lisamarie Hill as she ventures on her own search and rescue mission for Jimmy through the Douglas Channel to Monkey Beach, famous for its sasquatch sightings. Robinson’s debut novel is a gothic-style coming of age story that carefully blends Haisla mythology and the teenage experience with an underlying exploration of the impact of colonial violence in Canada.
That Tiny Life by Erin Frances Fisher (UVic MFA ‘14)
In this debut collection of short stories (and one novella), Erin Frances Fisher takes readers from a desert amputation in the American West to the edges of the galaxy once humans have run out of resources to extract on earth, then back to a raptor-breeding farm in B.C. The collection’s unifying core is captured in the blurb on the back cover, positioning That Tiny Life as an exploration of “humanity’s never-ending cycle of creation and destruction.”
Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan (UVic BFA ‘99)
Half Blood Blues follows a group of Black Jazz musicians in Europe during two significant times in their lives, fifty years apart: from Berlin and Paris in 1939–40 to 1992 as the surviving members of the Hot Time Swingers return to Berlin for a documentary screening about the life of Hieronymous Falk, their twenty year old German trumpet player who was arrested in 1940 and never seen again. The screening sends narrator Sid Griffiths and bandmate Chip Jones on an unexpected journey, and Sid must confront the ghosts he tried to leave behind in Europe fifty years before.
Dead Reckoning by Carys Cragg (UVic MA ‘08, BA ‘05)
“Grief isn’t only about the death of a loved one; rather, it is the process of building a new life, including a new relationship with the person who was no longer there,” Carys Cragg writes in her memoir, Dead Reckoning: How I Came to Meet the Man Who Murdered My Father.
In 1992, when Cragg was eleven, her father was murdered in their family home during a home invasion gone wrong. Dead Reckoning follows Cragg through the restorative justice process as she corresponds with — and ultimately goes to meet — the man who killed her father. Though raw and at times unsettling, Cragg’s book is a poignant exploration of how reconciliation may be achieved outside of the courtroom.
Lampedusa by Steven Price (UVic BFA ‘00)
Set in Sicily in the 1950s, this moving and contemplative historical fiction novel tells the story of Guiseppe Tomasi, the final prince of Italy’s southernmost island, Lampedusa, in his final years as he completes his own novel, The Leopard –– unpublished in his lifetime but now considered a masterpiece in Italy. Rooted in historical fact, this fictionalized biography is an elegant exploration of one of Italy’s great writers, through the mind of the artist himself. Steven Price carefully weaves memories from Tomasi’s youth with the realities of aging when diagnosed with emphysema.
Midway by Kayla Czaga (UVic BFA ‘11)
As the back of the book explains, Kayla Czaga’s third poetry collection explores “grief in all its manifestations,” taking readers from local Vietnamese restaurants and the beach to the Tate Modern in London and casinos in Las Vegas. While the collection is rooted in Czaga’s grief after her parents’ deaths, it is also funny and hopeful at the most unexpected of times — you may even find yourself laughing, like when she writes, “Inside a Pizza Pop, a god may be building a new world / with no people in it, only talking animals.”
