Burrard Inlet is the body of water that divides Vancouver's North Shore from the rest of the Lower Mainland. In this collection of award-winning stories, Tyler Keevil uses that rugged landscape as a backdrop for characters who are struggling against the elements, each other, and themselves. A search-and-rescue volunteer looks for a missing snowboarder on Christmas Eve; two brothers retreat to the woods to shoot a film in memory of their dead friend; a reclusive forestry worker picks up a hitcher on his way down Mount Seymour; a young man finds a temporary haven on the ice barge where he works. Written in a lean, muscular style, these are stories awash in blood and brine, and steeped in images of freedom and confinement. Within that narrative framework, Burrard Inlet becomes more than a geographical location: it is a liminal space, a boundary and a barrier, a threshold to be crossed.
'Beneath the deceptively calm surface of these spare and beautiful stories, mad passions boil. There is a transatlantic tradition of studying the interaction between men and nature, in such figures as Hemingway, Carver, McGuane; now Keevil extends and enriches that lineage. He truly is that good.' --Niall Griffiths (author of Grits, Runt, and Kelly & Victor)
'Keevil's "Tokes from the Wild" is an assured story of a city boy who follows his friend into the countryside to spend a summer tree planting, which soon degenerates into a mess of weed smoke and recriminations.' --The Short Review
Tyler Keevil's "Carving Through Woods on a Snowy Evening" tells of a snowboarder, missing on a mountainside not long after an accident, being tracked by hopeful rescuers. "Carving" has...storytelling rich in symbolism; subtle plot devices; and an ending that opens and sings.' --New Welsh Review
'There's real quality in Tyler Keevil's gripping tale of mountain rescue, "Carving Through Woods on a Snowy Evening".' --The Western Mail
'I read Tyler's amazing story "Sealskin" and was blown away. Beautiful writing...stunning' --Miriam Toews, author of All My Puny Sorrows
'Vividly told in muscular prose, Keevil's stories are compelling evocations of isolation and strength in an often unforgiving landscape.' --Carys Bray, author of A Song for Issy Bradley
'Burrard Inlet is, first and foremost, a collection of short stories that tries to recognise the relationship between humans and nature through separate human identities...This is a piece of work that, without a doubt, should be added to a book-shelf of short-story lovers and novel aficionados alike.' --Wales Arts Review
'The masculine, often unforgiving scenarios which unfold here are a suitable fit for Keevil's economical - if elegant - phrasing, but a strong moral core is ever-present, and sometimes vindication for the downtrodden.' --Buzz Magazine
'"Sealskin" is a stunner: straightforward and unadorned, but humming with subsurface power. Possessed of a sturdy narrative backbone and unrelenting forward momentum, the story explores familiar themes - alienation, humanity's relationship to nature, coming of age, and loss of innocence - but does so in a way that seems fresh and vibrant. Strong physical details adjoin keen psychological insights, and Keevil handily builds scenes that reverberate with insight and potency. Keevil has accomplished something rare: a story about rough masculinity that brims with emotion and pathos.' --The Journey Prize judges
'Keevil's writing has been compared to Raymond Carver's and I can understand the comparison, although the voice is most definitely his own. As with Carver, Keevil's stories are like ink on wet blotting paper there's a dense dark core of story arc, spare but telling detail and dialogue, yet around that dense mass is an aureola of implied back narrative and a sense of a continuum past the final full stop.'
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CCQ Magazine
