Mother Tongue Publishing: 8 books

Funny, tender and poignant, A Recipe for Disaster is populated by quirky characters who blend desire, imperfect love and comfort food into the sweet and salty mix of daily life while they yearn for the sustenance of human connection. A bemused child witnesses her mother flirt with a police officer...

A lively memoir in an authentic and engaging voice of growing up street savvy, the youngest of four boys, in the famous downtown working-class slums of Everton, Liverpool in the '50s and '60s before they were demolished. Our young hero is talented but his valiant attempts to “be good” sometimes...

Lucky is an unflinching novel set in the Middle East and Canada. It tells the story of Anika Lund, a freelance war photographer with an ambition to photograph an infamous terrorist, and her best friend and translator, Viva, who seeks answers to the mystery of her husband’s disappearance in Syria....

After surviving a health crisis, Jay heads to the remote and challenging Dease River in Northwestern BC for a canoe and fishing journey, but is unprepared for the mysterious stranger who becomes his passenger. A lean and intense tale that takes the reader to haunting depths. A seminal and brilliant addition to a neglected genre. Destined to become a Canadian classic.

Patrin Szkandery, a young woman living in Victoria BC in the 1970s, restores an ancient quilt and travels to Czechoslovakia to trace her Roma history over the unsettling terrain of central Europe in the years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The pieced cloth proves to be both coded map and palimpsest...

A collection of eight sharply imaginative short stories that focus on women’s relationships with their bodies, their lovers, their female friends, and their health. After an overweight cubicle worker takes a diet pill she loses sixty pounds in eight hours and her relationships with other women begins...

This enriching, complex family saga and interracial drama brims with beautiful prose. It begins one summer on Bowen Island during the Depression and moves through Pearl Harbour and the evacuation of the Japanese and into the 1970s. Gwen Killam is a child on Bowen whose idyllic summers are obliterated...

Winner of the 4th GREAT BC Novel Contest! This astonishing novel begins at a fair on a hot August day in 1971 in Hope, BC. Sage and Della Howard are driving to Fernie to start a job and begin a new life. They stop for a break, lose their dog and in the search find a crying toddler in the nearby...