Very slight edgewear and faint creasing of spine and covers, otherwise a fine clean tight and bright copy - Islands West offers an exciting cross-section of contemporary story-telling from the BC coast. Some of the stories gathered here are by famous writers like Jack Hodgins, Audrey Thomas, and Alice Munro; but many are by confident new voices, with new angles of vision, and compellingly different stories to tell. Islands West catches this astonishing wave of emerging talent and covers the spectacular waterfront of BC short fiction now. The stories range from murder mystery to reportage, comic sketches to lyric and visionary prose. The wide variety of stories reflect the authors’ many different cultural and ethnic backgrounds, told in shifting, unexpected voices. Yet they speak of lives more particular, complex, and variable than cultural categories