Reviewer picks 2025 (part II)
[Once again, we asked and our contributors answered. And, for the second year running eclectic was the commonality. The titles range from prize-winners to, well, books you’re likely to be seeing for the first time as you scroll through the picks below. A hearty thanks to our reviewers for their efforts! —Eds.]
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The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones.
With The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, modern horror master Stephen Graham Jones takes the main subject of Dracula (immortal vampire) and its epistolary format, swaps that setting for the American Frontier, and frames it all through the sins of European colonialism.
The result is haunting novel that blends standard vampire/horror tropes with the even more disturbing (and much more real) depictions of colonialism to create something that, while often unsettling and gory, is also deeply rooted in despair and a pervasive sadness that lingers until the last page.
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad.
Combining personal memoir with poetry and media criticism, Omar El Akkad’s fervent appeal for human decency in the wake of one of modern history’s worst humanitarian crises is a powerful plea for empathy and action.
Often scathing (and always justifiable), El Akkad calls out the hypocrisies among Western media and politicians, and even among the arts and literature community in which he himself has been a multiple award-winning darling (himself winning the Giller Prize in 2021).
The Bee Book by Ann Rosenberg.
The 2025 rerelease of Ann Rosenberg’s The Bee Book (first published in 1981) is one that has stuck with me well after reviewing it earlier this year.
With an unorthodox structure, the novel explores contemporary femininity through the metaphor of the beehive; and the resulting vignettes are, much like the beehive itself, a combination of natural beauty, symmetry, revulsion, and matriarchal order. —LM
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My reading travels beyond the current year or province of residence—to all those past and classic books demanding attention, never mind the annual avalanche. Nonetheless, I speak here of three favourite 2025 reads, in random order.
Francesca Wade’s Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife explores its titular character, partner Alice, and ‘players’ in Stein’s lived and posthumous milieu.
Deeply researched, it reveals historic, and ‘new’ information garnered from recently opened Stein archives at Yale. Fascinating and informative, it delves into a ‘large’ literary life amid artistic icons, war, relationship, sexual identity, and legacy.
BC writer Jan Zwicky’s Say It is a potent, widely-researched litany of numerical statistics, corporate brands, and chemical names.
Zwicky’s tight focus—on industrial and human impacts on planet Earth—accumulates undeniable truths so overwhelming that we distractedly glide over them daily.
This 19-page witnessing has been called the Howl of our time. It weighs and stuns with blunt data, poetically rendered. A must-read call-out.
A Simple Carpenter by Dave Margoshes sprints onto my list, as the 2025 winner of the Saskatchewan Book Awards Fiction Prize and Western Canada Jewish Book Award for Fiction.
It’s an engaging fable of an amnesiac’s complex quest through landscapes and challenges to discover who he is.
Is he a lost man, a saviour, or just an ordinary guy? Adventures, magical and mysterious, arise at every turn. —SRS
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Some books are old friends. Some new ones leading the way. Here are three BC books I’ve read this year that walk ahead.
Stephanie Bolster’s Long Exposure.
This intricate poetic exploration of personal and media images of the Hurricane Katrina, Chernobyl and WWII Japanese Internment camps is an acute examination of the role of poetry in a media world.
Daniela Elza’s Scar/city.
These poems—on the tough topic of community and the forces that break it—dance through the streets with characteristic pitch-perfect timing, self-awareness, and sheer lyric exuberance.
Chris Arnett’s Signs of the Time: Nłeʔkepmx Resistance through Rock Art is an enormous contribution to BC and Cascadian Indigenous studies. The links of rock art to ghost dances, Indigenous prophets, dreamer traditions and epidemics is a giant step forward into a fully inclusive history.
It’s an honour to follow these three books into the new year. I think their passion and attention to detail and place will be used as touchstones and models for decades to come. —HR
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A stark reminder of why I swore never to date musicians, Deep Cuts by Holly Brinkley is an excellent, voice-driven coming of age novel full of musical obsession, artistic ambitions, and romantic yearning, to say nothing of relational chaos.
If you miss the 2000s, look no further. I can’t wait to reread this one.
The Hunger We Pass Down is an unsettling, well-written novel with intergenerational trauma, angry women, and real horror—the supernatural kind and the fact of humankind.
This passage from Judith L. Hermann’s Trauma and Recovery comes to mind: “The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable. Atrocities, however, refuse to be buried.”
As a petty, jealous person, I try my hardest to hate graduates of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, but when they write novels as good as Fulfillment by Lee Cole, I find myself awed, engrossed, and yes, annoyed.
Cole nails tense sibling dynamics, political differences within families, and, with Emmett Shaw, a 28-year-old night shift distribution vents worker, a stark picture of financial precarity in a guy with a much more successful brother.
A truly impressive follow-up novel to his debut, Groundskeeping. —JP
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A Fall of Marigolds by Susan Meissner.
This is an intriguing combination of two historical periods in the history of New York—immigrants arriving at Ellis Island in the early 1900s and the fall of the two towers in 2001.
Meissner beautifully joins them together with colour and a magical scarf that transverses the decades and brings love to those who need it.
They Never Left Me: A Holocaust Memoir of Maternal Courage and Triumph by Evelyn Koch with Hodie Koch.
A memoir of the Holocaust seen through the eyes of a young child (Vancouver-based Evelyn) before, during, and after the Second World War.
This book moved me to tears with its heartbreaking descriptions of suffering, loss, despair, and the strength Jewish people needed to survive the unimaginable.
When the World Fell Silent by Donna Jones Alward.
This novel tells the story of the 1917 Halifax Explosion and the people who lived through it.
Beautifully researched, the story talks about survival during one of the most tragic events in Canadian history.
The characters are strong and memorable, and the story gives a glimpse into the lives of the ordinary people who survived the tragedy. —VG
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One of my favourite books this year was Shani Mootoo’s Starry Starry Night, an extraordinary work of autofiction following Anju, a young girl navigating 1960s Trinidad as the country moves toward independence.
Told entirely through a child’s perspective, Mootoo captures the devastation of family trauma as it unfolds beyond Anju’s comprehension. We understand what she cannot yet name, and that gap becomes a form of grief. The prose contains turbulence within beauty, like Van Gogh’s swirling night sky that gives the novel its title.
Ian Williams’ You’ve Changed is a daring comic dissection of a marriage in freefall.
Middle-aged Beckett and his wife Princess spiral into parallel midlife crises after a visit from a happily married couple exposes the cracks in their relationship, and Williams employs inventive typographical experiments to mirror their psychological unravelling.
I’ve read Williams’s poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, and what I admire most about his work is his inventive use of form.
Finally, Sarah Louise Butler’s Rufous and Calliope follows a cartographer with early-onset memory loss as he treks through BC’s Interior seeking the treehouse hideaway where he once lived while on the run with his siblings.
The wildfire smoke Rufous breathes mirroring the haze encroaching on his mind.
The result is a smoky, dreamlike meditation on the fragility of landscape and consciousness, and on the sibling bonds that shape us even when separation seems insurmountable. —SM
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Days of Feasting and Rejoicing by David Bergen
Bergen’s portrait of an American woman working in Thailand who draws the unsuspecting into her web, threatening to devour them as she stops at nothing to protect her unstable sense of self held me in thrall.
Hanging out in main character Esther Maile’s head is unsettling, uncomfortable, and terribly fascinating.
It’s a psychologically perilous tale of deception, manipulation, and murder.
I Want to Die in my Boots by Natalie Appleton
Readers who enjoy enigmatic and whimsical characters will find much to like in this fictional reimagining of Belle Jane Corneil, a woman who pushed against the conventional narratives of women in the early twentieth century on the North American prairie.
This is a vibrant tale told in the voice of a spirited woman who doesn’t allow society to confine her as she forges ahead, sometimes at the edge of the law.
Procession by Katherena Vermette
This poetry collection lives up to its moniker: It’s a procession, from memories of our ancestors, to our own lives as transient touchstones, and ending with poems that celebrate the passing of our Elders as we become Elders in turn.
It’s full of interconnectedness and joy, and–at times–subtle, practical humour.
At the end of reading the book I felt welcomed into Vermette’s world, and I fully enjoyed being her guest. —TB
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The British Columbia Review
Interim Editors: Trevor Marc Hughes (nonfiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie
Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.
“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster