The British Columbia Review | Books and Culture of British Columbia

Maingon 3. feature cover Where the Earth Meets the Sky

Wild Antarctica: science, healing, conservation

“As many visitors to Antarctica have remarked, time spent witnessing the stunning abundance of life beyond the polar zone of extreme cold waters and the sheer beauty of that continent is life-changing. Blight witnesses that unlike her experience of previous research sites, which include the Canadian Arctic, Antarctica forever changed her ‘understanding of the world.’ This is her account of that break from ‘The World, The Real World, The World,’ as she and most scientists working in Antarctica refer to the outside world beyond the polar seas. Antarctica is her discovery and recovery back to a saner place of nature, no matter how harsh. It is a place where life meets death and grows from it.” Loÿs Maingon reviews Where The Earth Meets The Sky: A Story of Penguins, People and Place in Antarctica, by Louise K. Blight (Toronto: Doubleday Canada / Bond Street Books, 2026) $38 / 9780385702102

9781834050263_FC_Super Castle Fun Park (1)

Zeitgeists

An author’s complexly layered first novel “offers readers a world where ghosts (be them literal or metaphorical) are omnipresent features in the lives of the novel’s ensemble cast” Through them, he develops “perspectives on themes such as grief, personal growth, sexuality, and connection in ways that range from sardonic and humorous to more emotionally resonant, often shifting between the two in quick succession.” —Logan Macnair reviews Super Castle Fun Park, by Daniel Zomparelli (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2026) $24.95 / 978183405026

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Long live the Sixties

“By the time I got to Simon Fraser University in the early 1970s, Jim Harding had already left campus but his legacy lingered as SFU continued to fester with student unrest after the historic strike in 1967. That event labelled SFU a ‘radical’ campus and Harding was part of the cohort of students and faculty that openly challenged and defied the actions of the university administration. It was a bold, exciting, and educational moment. Harding was among the leaders.” Ron Verzuh reviews The Long Sixties: Stories from the New Left, by Jim Harding [ed.] (Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 2026) $29 / 9781773638034

Rogers 3. feature cover Chinatown Vancouver

‘The Chinatown of her childhood’

“Seto, mourning the past and given time to resurrect her creativity, recreated the buildings of memory and left them empty so that memory and desire could replace the ghosts inhabiting them with real lives configured with real information, the sensory details, smells and sounds that gave them life.” Linda Rogers reviews Chinatown Vancouver: An Illustrated History, by Donna Seto (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2025) $29.99 / 9781487011970

Through the eyes of young civilians

Set in war-torn Ukraine, Poland, and Germany during 1945, a wide-ranging and fast-faced novel recounts the urgent movements of Frida and Jakob, “two survivors who hope to start a new life for themselves in a postwar world.” —Bill Paul reviews Rust and Bone, by Dietrich Kalteis (Toronto: ECW Press, 2026) $24.95 / 9781770418509

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What fish is that?

“There are more than 240 life histories of all the fishes calling the strait home for all or part of the year. Dick Beamish and Jeff Marliave are well-known scientists who have put this book together for you.” DC Reid reviews Fishes of the Strait of Georgia: More than 240 Life Stories, by Dick Beamish & Jeff Marliave (Madeira Park: Harbour Publishing, 2025) $80 / 9781990776830

Segger 38. feature image. Entrance gates to the “Bowker Estate”, now a feature of Willows Park Oak Bay. Photo Martin Segger copy

Silent sentinels

“Victoria’s urban landscape is littered with these remnants or references, in this case, to the golden age of Victoria’s great garden estates. They are a part of a legacy of similar markers, such as iron curbs that once protected sidewalks from steel-rimmed carriage wheels, hitching posts for horses stabled in the Rockland and Fernwood neighbourhoods, or small pockets of Garry Oaks that survived from a pre-settlement habitat that nurtured the Lekwungen people. These touchstones of community memory lend richness and meaning to the built heritage that tells Victoria’s story.” Martin Segger contributes the article Silent Sentinels, adapted from his upcoming book Tending Eden: A garden history of Victoria.

Expectations and setbacks

A graphic novel for younger readers tells the tale of twin sisters who cannot wait to start a summer school programme for junior illustrators. Be careful what you wish for, they soon learn. —Brett Josef Grubisic reviews Inbetweens, by Faith Erin Hicks (New York: First Second, 2026) $20.99 / 9781250838742

Agreeing during a downturn

“The book is primarily a record of the concept, strategies, and outcomes from an innovative government policy-development approach proposed by then-Premier Glen Clark. At the time Clark’s financially-strapped government was facing ‘an imminent economic crisis.’ The authors explain that Premier Clark was faced with almost 240,000 public employee contracts expiring on the same day, as well as two prior years of restraint.” Richard Fyfe reviews 35 Accords: Re-imagining British Columbia’s Public Sector Labour Relations
by Tony Penikett and John Calvert (Cambridge, UK: Ethics International Press, 2025) $57 / 9781837112791

‘Things’ and representations

A quantum “world pushes in on an isolated self” in a batch of playful, meditative, performative, and surreal poetry. “This is hard stuff, looked at with a cold eye. It’s beautiful, fierce, profoundly defensive, smart as heck, and intrusive,” our reviewer remarks. Harold Rhenisch reviews Who Else in the Dark Headed There, by Garth Martens (Windsor: Biblioasis, 2026) $21.95 / 9781771967082

Rogers 3. feature cover The Ship for Kobe copy

Transforming travelogue into high art

“If they are a choir, Genni Gunn, an Italo-Canadian poet and musician, translator of this volume, lifts it out of sea narrative to angel choir. Her sensibilities, like Maraini’s, bring harmony to the deliverance of a poetically nuanced story to universality.” Linda Rogers reviews The Ship for Kobe, by Dacia Maraini, translated by Genni Gunn (Hamilton: Guernica Editions, 2025) $22.95 / 9781778490019

Biologist for a global village

“An autobiography is often just about an individual. However, when the narrative focuses on the principles that have guided the path of an individual’s development and where they originated, it becomes more than about the individual. It confirms the adage that it takes a village to raise a child. That makes for interesting thoughtful reading as Grant identifies the elements of her life that pre-disposed her to success.” Loÿs Maingon reviews One Step Sideways, Three Steps Forward: One Woman’s Path to Becoming a Biologist, by B. Rosemary Grant (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2025) $27.95 / 9780691260600

The image in the mirror

In a sophomore poetry collection—that’s “a triumph”—set primarily in a psychiatric ward, an author examines their past and envisions an integrated future. The account of a “tremendous and ongoing struggle to heal” is both technically accomplished and visceral. —Joanna Streetly reviews Pitiful, by Brandi Bird (Toronto: House of Anansi, 2026) $22.99 / 9781487014087

Levenson 1. feature image Animals and Language.-Painting-at-Lascaux-caves-od-horses-deer-and-aurochs

‘But it’s not just horses’

“Other animal behaviours too live on in our everyday speech. Even if few of us have ever literally taken ‘the bull by the horns’ or ‘bought a pig in a poke’ (what is a poke in this instance? a bag or sack, nowadays an obsolete or dialect word, so the phrase means ‘to buy something without seeing or being able to test it’) most of us flounder at times or try ‘to feather our nests.’” Christopher Levenson urges us to contemplate the origin of such phrases as ‘free rein’ and ‘ride roughshod over’ in his A Word in Your Ear essay ‘Animals and Language.’

Hughes 1. feature image Nancy J. Turner interview segment

Nancy J. Turner – With Indigenous teachers

“Nancy J. Turner has spent a career working with Indigenous teachers who have shared their traditional knowledge with her, but as she tells The British Columbia Review, not all is shared, some is private, but one thing is clear: that she is grateful for the teachings.” Trevor Marc Hughes presents an interview segment with ethnobotanist and author Nancy J. Turner.

Shame, guilt, and authenticity

“[E]xcellent” debut YA novel reflects an author who “put his heart and soul into this book.” Plus: “Coming to this book in middle age, and as a fairly non-sentimental reader, the novel surprised me when I actually almost cried at one point, so invested was I in this wonderfully well-developed character of Ramin Abbas.” —Trish Bowering reviews Ramin Abbas Has MAJOR Questions, by Ahmad Saber (Toronto: Atheneum/Caitlyn Dlouhy Books, 2026) $29.99 /9781665960694

Belshaw 3. feature cover The Canada Handbook

Sharp wit / sharp pencil

“In BC, cartoonists like Len Norris, Roy Peterson, Bob Krieger, Dan Murphy, Raeside, and (more lately) Pia Guerra have demonstrated what a sharp wit can do with a sharp pencil. Nurtured for decades by daily spots on the local newspaper’s editorial/opinion page, these giants of jest created lasting and recognizable characters, styles, voices, values, and understandings of who we are.” John Belshaw reviews The Canada Handbook, by Adrian Raeside (Madeira Park: Harbour Publishing, 2025) $22.95 / 9781550179538

Dart 3. feature cover West Coast Mission

Keeping which faith?

“The strength of West Coast Mission is the way that Lockhart has sensitively and wisely heeded and attempted to bring the best out of the varied communities he has focussed on. The weakness of the book is the vast variety of other forms of Christianity he has simply not sat with or listened to in the Vancouver area and they are many.” Ron Dart reviews West Coast Mission: The Changing Nature of Christianity in Vancouver, by Ross A. Lockhart (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2024) $34.95 / 9780228022862

Wiley Ho – A writing community

“Wiley Wei-Chiun Ho’s new memoir… is The Astronaut Children of Dunbar Street. She tells The British Columbia Review her book may have, in its early days, turned out to be a mystery, travel writing, or fiction, before she settled on memoir.” Trevor Marc Hughes presents an interview segment featuring North Vancouver writer Wiley Wei-Chiun Ho.

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The courtrooms of his mind

An immersive and satisfying sequel to a 2015 debut novel finds a youthful protagonist—”a force unto himself,” who’s “always compelling on the page”—in literal wilderness as he sorts himself. —Trish Bowering reviews When the World Was Twice as Big, by Aaron Cully Drake (Gibsons: Nightwood Editions, 2026) $23.95 / 9780889715042

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