Bill Richardson’s Featured Book
I Saw Three Ships
Longlisted for the 2020 Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour. Nominated for the 2020 B.C. and Yukon Book Prizes’ Bill Duthie Bookseller Choice Award.
Eight linked stories, all set around Christmastime in Vancouver’s West End neighbourhood, explore the seasonal tug-of-war between expectation and disappointment. These tales give shelter to characters from various walks of life whose experience of transcendence leaves them more alienated than consoled.
I Saw Three Ships captures a West End community vanishing under pressure from development and skyrocketing real-estate prices. As arch as they are elegiac, as funny as they are melancholy, these stories honour a cherished period in the history of the West End. Sometimes twisted, sometimes tender, I Saw Three Ships will speak to all who have ever been stuck spinning their wheels at the corner of Heathen and Holy.
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