BC Books Day

Illustrated by Tenaya Fogelman

This year’s British Columbia Books Day falls on a Tuesday, so I’m not going to any events.

But this week also features Canadian Independent Bookstore Day on Saturday, so at some point over the next few days I’ll go to Munro’s, Ivy’s, Bolen’s, and/or Russell’s, for an overdue book haul of recent fiction and poetry. (It’s also poetry month!)

Some suggestions for readers:

Poetry: I can’t recommend Karen Solie’s Wellwater highly enough; I pre-ordered the UK edition of the collected Sylvia Plath poems; I need to pick up Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s The Way Disabled People Love Each Other and Camilla Gibb’s I Used to Be a Pisces; and I’ve pre-ordered Tanis MacDonald’s Tall, Grass, Girl, out this fall.

Crime fiction: Sam Wiebe’s Vancouver-set noirish novels are terrific, and I’m catching up on the latest; Kevin Major’s Six for Saint-Pierre is the most recent in his series of Newfoundland and Labrador-set tourism mysteries; and there’s a long list of intriguing 2026 Canadian crime novels.

Other fiction: Jane Park’s Inheritance and Carianne Leung’s Wonderland Road are family stories; Wayne Johnston’s The Novice of Holloway Hall sounds fascinating; and so does Liz Johnston’s west coast environmental novel, The Fall-Down Effect.