Tibet after the Chinese invasion. Vancouver in the 1930s. Victorian London. Syria in 2003. The settings of the books featured are as diverse as the authors who imagined them, but all are breathtaking in scope and marvelous in detail. Tsering Yangzom Lama’s haunting novel We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies recounts a Tibetan family’s fifty-year journey through exile and their struggles to forge new lives of dignity, love, and hope. Chelene Knight’s Junie is a riveting exploration of the complexity within mother-daughter relationships set in the dynamic vitality of Vancouver’s former Hogan’s Alley neighbourhood. J.M. Miro’s spellbinding fantasy, Ordinary Monsters, presents a catastrophic vision of the Victorian world—and of the gifted, broken children who must save it. Danny Ramadan’s The Foghorn Echoes is a deeply moving epic about a forbidden love between two boys in war-torn Syria and the fallout that ripples through their adult lives.

with Chelene Knight, Tsering Yangzom Lama, J.M. Miro, and Danny Ramadan Live music by Peach Pyramid/Jen Severtson

The readings will be woven together with music by Jen Severtson/Peach Pyramid