2004 Vancouver Book Award Finalists and Honourable Mentions

Author & Title Information

 

The short list for the 2004 City of Vancouver Book Award had been chosen by an independent jury. The works range from a biography, to a compilation of three novellas, to juvenile fiction. This year, the judges wanted also to acknowledge three authors to receive an honourable mention for their important contribution to the body of work published about Vancouver.

Mayor Larry Campbell presented the award to the winning author in Council Chamber at City Hall on Tuesday, October 19, 2004.

Note: authors listed in alphabetical order

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Daniel Francis
L.D.: Mayor Louis Taylor and the Rise of Vancouver
Arsenal Pulp Press

LD is the colourful biography of Louis Taylor, the longest-serving mayor in Vancouver’s history. Taylor’s story is also the story of Vancouver in the early decades of the 20th century, a young city experiencing a turbulent adolescence.

Louise Taylor, or LD as he was known, arrived in the city from Chicago in 1896. He jumped into politics in 1902 when he successfully ran for license commissioner. His political career was a myriad of highs and lows including everything from implications in a police investigation to establishing the airport and the water board.

His private life was a virtual soap opera that mirrored the ups and downs of his political career as he found himself mired in bigamy and divorce scandals.

LD.: Mayor Louis Taylor and the Rise of Vancouver vividly documents the life of a man who dominated the city for years, and the integral role he played in shaping the Vancouver of today.

Daniel Francis is a historian and the author/editor of more than fifteen books, including The Imaginary Indian: The Image of the Indian in Canadian Culture and Imagining Ourselves: Classics of Canadian Non-Fiction, both published by Arsenal Pulp Press. His other books include Copying People: Photographing British Columbia First Nations 1860-1940, The Great Chase: A History of World Whaling, and New Beginnings: A Social History of Canada.

His most recent project was the popular Encyclopedia of British Columbia.

Francis lives in North Vancouver, B.C.

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Annabel Lyon
The Best Thing for You
McClelland & Stewart

Here, in three novellas, Lyon reveals the potential for darkness that lurks behind even the most perfect-seeming veneer. In the first novella, “No Fun,” a middle-class family in present-day Vancouver is thrown into turmoil when their teenage son is charged in connection with the beating of a disabled man. In “The Goldberg Metronome,” a young couple discovers an antique metronome taped up and hidden under a sink in their new apartment. Its dark past weaves a story that crosses centuries and continents. Then, in the stunning title novella, a riveting and layered film-noirish piece set in wartime 1940s Vancouver, a housewife in her twenties plots and carries out her husband’s murder with sang-froid, with the help of her lover, a young grocery-store clerk. Later, the son of the insurance agent who loses his job over the woman’s claim must deal with his family’s financial downfall as he nurses his own obsession with her crime and its connection to the music in his head.

Lyon draws us in with her vivid characters and sharp, highly charged prose and holds us in the worlds she creates. Along the way, she challenges the fragile illusion of goodness in our lives. Once again Annabel Lyon has demonstrated herself to be one of Canada’s boldest, most exciting new voices.

Annabel Lyon’s first book of fiction, Oxygen (2000), a collection of short stories, was published to wide acclaim. Her short fiction has appeared in Toronto Life, The Journey Prize Anthology, and Write Turns: New Directions in Canadian Fiction. She is also a frequent contributor to the Vancouver Sun and the Globe and Mail. In addition to creative writing, Annabel Lyon has studied music, philosophy, and law. She lives in Vancouver, where she writes full time.

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Paul Yee
The Bone Collector's Son
Tradewind Books

This ghost story is set in the year 1907 in Vancouver. Fourteen-year-old Bingwing Chan resents his father, not only because the man gambles away all their money, but also because he now forces Bing to help him in his gruesome job. Ba is the bone collector, the one who digs up skeletons of deceased Chinese so that they can be sent home to China for permanent burial. Sinister things start happening soon after Bing accompanies his father to the graveyard.

Paul Yee is one of Canada’s finest writers for young people. His first book for Tradewind Books was The Jade Necklace (2002). Dead Man’s Gold and Other Stories (2002) was a Kiriyama Prize Notable Book. Ghost Train (1996) won a Governor General’s Award.

Paul Yee was born in Saskatchewan, grew up in Vancouver, but has lived in Toronto since 1988. He studied history at UBC, worked as an archivist, and did research and volunteer work in Vancouver’s Chinatown, the source of much of his writing.

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Caroline Adderson
Sitting Practice
Thomas Allen Publishers

Three and a half weeks after his wedding, Ross Alexander is driving home from a tennis game with his new bride when a wayward tennis ball rolls under his feet. As his wife Iliana removes her seatbelt to retrieve the ball, a truck slams into the car, and she ends up paralyzed and in a coma.

So begins this extraordinary novel of love and desire, loss, betrayal and redemption.

Following the fateful car accident, Ross struggles with his guilt over the consequences of his wife’s paralysis and for the imagined life that is now forever lost. He turns to an exploration of Buddhist principles to ease his pain. He must also contend with his co-dependent twin sister, Bonnie, mother of his adored nephew, who is jealous of the other woman in her brother’s life. Iliana must deal with her new existence as a wheelchair-bound wife, her husband’s feelings of alienation, and their aching and growing lack of intimacy.

In this stunning new novel, acclaimed writer Caroline Adderson shows how lives can change forever because of one fateful moment. With characters that are achingly real, Adderson demonstrates why she is one of Canada’s most talented and significant writers.

Caroline Adderson’s first collection of stories, Bad Imaginings, was nominated for the 1993 Governor General’s Award for Fiction and the 1994 Commonwealth Writers Prize, and won the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. Her critically acclaimed first novel, A History of Forgetting, was short listed for the Roger’s Writer’s Trust Fiction Award. Adderson lives in Vancouver.

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Maggie de Vries
Missing Sarah
Penguin Canada

On April 14, 1998, Sarah de Vries disappeared from the corner of Princess and Hastings in Vancouver. She became one of the many women who had vanished from the Downtown Eastside, women-most of them prostitutes or drug addicts-whose fate was all but ignored by the authorities. Years went by, women continued to disappear, and there were no answers for their families.

For the women who disappeared did have families. They were loved, they had friends, they had lives that began long before their terrible end. And Maggie de Vries’s sister Sarah was one of them.

Although Sarah and Maggie shared a comfortable, middle-class upbringing, Sarah, adopted as an infant, was black, while the rest of her family was white; and so she alone was the victim of racist taunts and prejudice. As Sarah reached adolescence, her troubles grew. She ran away from home. She became addicted to drugs. She ended up on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. But always she was loved.

Missing Sarah, which incorporates excerpts from Sarah’s journals, is Maggie de Vries’s story of her search for her sister. From those journals, and from the recollections of people who knew Sarah during her 14 years downtown, emerges a portrait of a bright, funny and sensitive woman who found herself trapped in a downward spiral of self-loathing, prostitution, drugs and violence.

From the moment Sarah disappeared, her sister never stopped looking for her. Even after Sarah’s DNA was discovered at Robert Pickton’s farm, and hope was replaced by grim certainty, Maggie continued her search. This time she was looking for answers. Why did so many women have to disappear before the authorities took notice? Was there any way Sarah could have been saved from her life on the streets? And what can we do to help those women who are still trapped, by chance or circumstance, in the same bleak world that Sarah de Vries once inhabited?

Maggie de Vries is a writer, editor and teacher who lives in Vancouver. Her recent children’s novel, Chance and the Butterfly, is a B.C. Book Prize Honour Book and is also included on the Ontario Library Association’s list of Best Bets. She is also the author of two picture books: How Sleep Found Tabitha, and the bestselling Once Upon a Golden Apple.

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Caroline Adderson
Sitting Practice
Thomas Allen Publishers

Three and a half weeks after his wedding, Ross Alexander is driving home from a tennis game with his new bride when a wayward tennis ball rolls under his feet. As his wife Iliana removes her seatbelt to retrieve the ball, a truck slams into the car, and she ends up paralyzed and in a coma.

So begins this extraordinary novel of love and desire, loss, betrayal and redemption.

Following the fateful car accident, Ross struggles with his guilt over the consequences of his wife’s paralysis and for the imagined life that is now forever lost. He turns to an exploration of Buddhist principles to ease his pain. He must also contend with his co-dependent twin sister, Bonnie, mother of his adored nephew, who is jealous of the other woman in her brother’s life. Iliana must deal with her new existence as a wheelchair-bound wife, her husband’s feelings of alienation, and their aching and growing lack of intimacy.

In this stunning new novel, acclaimed writer Caroline Adderson shows how lives can change forever because of one fateful moment. With characters that are achingly real, Adderson demonstrates why she is one of Canada’s most talented and significant writers.

Caroline Adderson’s first collection of stories, Bad Imaginings, was nominated for the 1993 Governor General’s Award for Fiction and the 1994 Commonwealth Writers Prize, and won the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. Her critically acclaimed first novel, A History of Forgetting, was short listed for the Roger’s Writer’s Trust Fiction Award. Adderson lives in Vancouver.

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