They say don’t judge a book by its cover, but some book covers perfectly capture the beauty within the pages. This Paperback Book Day, observed on the date that the first Penguin paperbacks were published back in 1935, we’re celebrating both the extraordinary work of our local authors and that of the cover designers and artists who ensure those stories are represented the way they deserve before the readers even crack the spines.
FICTION
The Cobra and the Key by Sam Shelstad (TouchWood Editions)
Sam, the protagonist of this novel, is certain that he’ll be a successful novelist very soon. After all, the manuscript of his debut novel The Emerald is currently on the desk of a celebrated indie publisher. While he waits to hear back, he’s hard at work on two ambitious writing projects. The first is the Molly novel, a fictional rendering of Sam’s newly defunct relationship. The second is a guide for aspiring fiction writers, drawing on examples from the work of greats like George Orwell, Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Alice Munro, Kazuo Ishiguro, Clarise Lispector, and Sam Shelstad to take the novice through aspects of character, detail, plot, style, point of view, dialogue, and meaning. The two meta-narratives have much to teach one another, and much to elucidate the reader about.
“The Cobra and the Key is a relentlessly witty work of satire,” writes Giller Prize-longlisted author Fawn Parker, “the mastery of which is veiled behind Shelstad’s deceptively clean and cool prose. A true pleasure to read—tongue planted firmly in cheek.”
This cover by designer David Drummond captures that precisely: cool, clean, and a pleasure for the eyes to behold. It holds a tremendous amount of wit just right for the kind of story only Sam Shelstad can write.
Available October 2023!
The Whole Animal by Corinna Chong (Arsenal Pulp Press)
Designed by Jazmin Welch, and featuring a painting by Christina Mrozik, the cover to this striking debut collection by Corinna Chong spins something unexpected out of the internal anatomy of a Cebu flowerpecker.
There cannot be a more perfect match for the stories in The Whole Animal, where bodies are divided, often elusive, even grotesque. Flawed characters wrestle with the complexities of relationships with partners, parents, children, and friends as they struggle to find identity, belonging, and autonomy. In “Porcelain Legs,” a pre-teen fixes on the long, thick hair growing from her mother’s eyelid. In “Wolf-Boy Saturday,” a linguist grasps for connection with a young boy whose negligent upbringing has left him unable to speak. In “Butter Buns,” a college student sees his mother in a new light when she takes up bodybuilding.
For fans of Souvankham Thammavongsa, Lynn Coady, and Lisa Moore, The Whole Animal explores bodies both human and animal: our fascination with their strange effluences, growths, and protrusions, and the dangerous ways we play with their power to inflict harm on ourselves and on others.
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Cardboard City by Katarina Jovanovic (Tradewind Books)
This vividly evocative cover by Elisa Gutierrez depicts two teenage members of a Romani family looking over an informal settlement spread out under a bridge in Belgrade—a “cardboard city,” in which protagonists Saida and Nikola dream of music and yearn for escape from harsh discrimination and crushing poverty.
With a cover as “clear-eyed and artful” as the novel it represents, Cardboard City is, according to Kirkus Reviews, “without overtones of judgment or lamentation. Each character is allowed their own voice and story, the third-person perspective shifting effortlessly between individuals and driving home the dignity of each one.”
The novel is both a striking capture of two Romani teenagers’ coming-of-age and a nuanced introduction for readers of all ages to the virulent racism, injustice, and inhumane conditions endured by this community to this very day.
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ART
A Dream in the Eye, edited by Stephen Collis (Talonbooks)
A Dream in the Eye presents 74 paintings and 80 collages by the brilliant poet Phyllis Webb, a major Canadian cultural figure from the 1950s through the 1980s. Webb published ten collections of poetry and prose, but when words “abandoned” her in the early 1990s, she took up photography, photocollage, and eventually painting.
Webb’s visual work in many ways responds to and expands upon concerns that she explored in her poetry: the natural world of the West Coast, global political strife, the artist’s struggle to express themself. Yet the expansive nature of her paintings and photocollages speaks for itself, and nothing captures that better than cover designer Leslie Smith’s choice to centre a painting by Webb with minimal text, showcasing Webb’s visual art as its own kind of captivating poetry.
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Out of the Fire: Metalworkers along the Salish Sea by Pirjo Raits (Heritage House)
Winner of the 2023 Alcuin Society Book Designer Awards for the Prose Illustrated category, this stunning art book written by Pirjo Raits and photographed by Dale Roth and Michele Ramberg features 24 West Coast artists and craftspeople working primarily in metal.
Out of the Fire: Metalworkers along the Salish Sea is a breathtaking celebration of a diverse group of contemporary artists and artisans, who explore the creative possibilities of an ancient medium. From sculptors to farriers, forgers to blacksmiths, jewellers to metalsmiths, and weapons makers to welders, the 24 people featured in this book reflect the wide range of talent, skill, and ingenuity that exists on Canada’s southwest coast.
With over one hundred spectacular colour and black-and-white photographs of the artists and their works, Out of the Fire is a stunning behind-the-scenes look at those who choose fire as their tool and metal as their raw material.
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NONFICTION
Frances Barkley: Eighteenth-century Seafarer by Cathy Converse (Heritage House)
Over 200 years ago, Frances Barkley, a seventeen-year-old girl fresh out of a convent school in France, met a twenty-six-year-old sea captain, fell deeply in love, and married him after a six-week courtship. Five weeks later, she stepped aboard his ship, the Imperial Eagle, to set sail on an eight-year voyage that would take them around the world twice.
Frances Barkley’s story is born of discovery, of firsts, of hardship, of disease, of illness, and of death. Relying on her strength of character and wit, this young woman survived fierce seas, shipwreck, and capture by pirates. When Frances was approaching her seventh decade, she put pen to paper at the behest of her daughter and wrote down what she could remember of her life with her husband in the merchant sea trade.
She is captured on the book’s cover through an illustration by Kimiko Fraser, designed by Setareh Ashrafologhalai. Frances Barkley: Eighteenth-century Seafarer is not simply a re-issue of Frances’s own reminiscences, but a work of creative non-fiction—an extensive reimagining of her time at sea, supplemented through extensive historical, geographic, and nautical research.
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Upholding Indigenous Economic Relationships: Nehiyawak Narratives by Shalene Wuttunee Jobin (UBC Press)
Designed by Gerilee McBride and featuring artwork by Christi Belcourt, the simple, arresting, effective beauty of this cover contains multitudes not to be underestimated: Upholding Indigenous Economic Relationships is an unflinching breakdown of settler colonialism through the lens of economic exploitation, using Indigenous methodologies and critical approaches. What is the relationship between economic progress in the land now called Canada and the exploitation of Indigenous Peoples? And what gifts embedded within Indigenous world views speak to miyo‐pimâtisiwin ᒥᔪ ᐱᒫᑎᓯᐃᐧᐣ (the good life), and specifically to good economic relations?
This groundbreaking study employs Cree narratives that draw from the past and move into the present to reveal previously overlooked Indigenous economic theories and relationships, and provides contemporary examples of nehiyawak renewing these relationships in resurgent ways. In the process, Upholding Indigenous Economic Relationships offers tools that enable us to reimagine how we can aspire to the good life with all our relations.
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Remnants: Reveries of a Mountain Dweller by Natalie Virginia Lang (Caitlin Press)
With whimsical descriptions, thoughtful clarity, and quiet meditation echoed in this enchanting cover design by Chrissy Courtney, this memoir by writer and educator Natalie Virginia Lang invites readers to join her in reexamining our relationships to the natural world.
Through poetic prose, Remnants: Reveries of a Mountain Dweller meditates on the social, historical, cultural, and environmental losses suffered at the hands of infringement upon natural areas. Remnants ventures into the natural spaces on Sumas Mountain, illuminating the errors of the modern colonial approach to progress and posing philosophical queries for alternate pathways into the future. In close encounters with creatures, forests, and climate change, Lang brings us an embodied experience of nature and bridges the gap between science, philosophy, academic theories, and the social sphere.
The result is a fresh lens through which to see our relationship with that natural world — one that inspires us to join an ever-growing conversation about finding balance with our environment, even in the midst of growth.
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Searching for Happy Valley: A Modern Quest for Shangri-La by Jane Marshall (Rocky Mountain Books)
As a travel writer with a 17-year career, Jane Marshall has travelled far and wide in search of off-the-beaten-track places. Yet across three continents separated by vast oceans, she has found hidden valleys known locally as “Happy Valley.” Sleeping on ridges, in caves, and in the traditional homes of local people, Marshall makes gruelling journeys to the heart of the happy valleys as she strives to comprehend the deep peace she feels within them. She immerses herself in the land and forms deep connections with its people so she can learn sustainable ways of living their Indigenous populations have honed over millennia.
From a goat herder’s hut in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco to a Sundance ceremony with the Blackfoot/Soki-tapi people of Alberta to a dangerous pilgrimage in Nepal, Searching for Happy Valley offers an adventure as an alternative to a world facing devastation on so many levels: the search for Shangri-La and the wisdom that can save the planet and our own hearts.
This cover design by Lara Minja captures, simply, what National Geographic Explorer Wade Davis describes as “a journey of light and love into the far horizons of the spirit.”
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VERSE
knee deep in high water: riding the Muskwa-Kechika, expedition poems by Bronwyn Preece (Caitlin Press)
Written on the trail during a two-week-long horse expedition, knee deep in high water is a chronicle of the most physically challenging experience following Preece’s accident which left her with a crooked knee. This collection is an impassioned ode to the breathtaking beauty of the backcountry. As she journeys through melting mountains and rising rivers, Preece encounters new moments of thwarted plans and questioned ethics that parallel her personal path of healing, both physical and emotional. These poems are an account of one woman’s movement into a deeper understanding of self. She grapples with her role as a settler in the unceded lands that provide her with so much comfort and attachment, as well as her own fragility and strength in relation to the terrains she explores.
The rich and colourful artwork by Deryk Houston in this cover, designed by Vici Johnstone, highlights the tapestry of lessons and longings that Preece faces in knee deep in high water—a collection that is at once breathtaking poetry, intimate travel diary, and a love letter to the trail and to returning home.
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Bramah’s Quest by Renée Sarojini Saklikar (Harbour Publishing)
In Bramah’s Quest, the second instalment of Renée Sarojini Saklikar’s epic fantasy saga in verse, The Heart of This Journey Bears All Patterns, it is the year 2087 and Bramah is back on a planet Earth ravaged by climate change and global inequality. Hailed as “brilliant and masterful” as well as “timely” by poet Kerry Gilbert, this book-length poem finds Bramah on a quest to find her people, including the little boy Raphael, last seen at the end of the 2021 book Bramah and the Beggar Boy.
Renée Sarojini Saklikar reclaims poetry forms such as blank verse, the sonnet, the ballad, and the madrigal, and this cover art by Nadina Tandy emphasizes what we’ll only find to be more and more true with each section of this long poem: that each page in Bramah’s Quest is a portal, connecting readers to the resistance of seed savers, craftspeople, scientists, and orphans, all banded together to help save their world from eco-catastrophe and injustice.
Available August 2023!