Tom Waits, entre légende et réalité : voici le portrait sans fard d’un artiste culte, à la fois poète maudit, musicien génial et acteur inoubliable.

Grant Buday’s new novel is an eccentric coming-of-age story that captures the late-Victorian fascination with ancient Egypt, auras, and the afterlife.Smart, stubborn, and forthright Pearl Greyland-Smith is nine years old when we first meet her, in 1882. She lives with her widowed mother, Florence, in Victoria’s James Bay neighbourhood. Pearl’s father was a Hussar who died in Afghanistan, or that’s what Florence has always told Pearl. But when an Irish woman named Cassidy arrives at their door and addresses Florence as Sinead, Pearl begins to realize she may not know very much about her origins at all.An avid reader with a rich inner life, as Pearl grows up she nonetheless confronts the scarcity of choices available to women. Yet while lacking in certain amenities, Pearl and Florence’s days are anything but dull, populated by characters easily at home in a Dickens novel: the earnest and enigmatic amateur scientist Charles Gloster, their bawdy, theosophist housemaid Carpy, inspector Osmo Beattie, and imperialist newspaper columnist Harry Hearne. Then a fateful encounter at a solstice fête throws Pearl’s whole future into question.This delightful coming-of-age story, imbued with the Victorian fascination for auras and the afterlife, will appeal to readers of Patrick DeWitt and Eleanor Catton. Once again Grant Buday has turned distant West Coast history upside down and created a vivid world intimately relevant to us today.

Finalist, City of Vancouver Book Award Monday Night Man is a back alley view of East Vancouver netherworlds. Horst Nunn, Ray Bunce, and Boyle Rupp are a trio of middle-aged, underemployed, intelligent "plungers" striving for redemption through humour and long shots at the track. Praise for Monday Night Man: "These stories . . . combine the flavours of Dickens and Charles Bukowski, with a good hit of The Three Stooges thrown in." (Bruce Serafin, founder, Vancouver Review) "Buday is a careful stylist; his language is clean and carefully plotted, his dialogue quick and convincing." (Kevin Connolly, Paragraph) Anagram Pictures option

Finalist, City of Vancouver Book Prize A blackly comic new novel from Vancouver author Grant Buday, based on his eight glorious years working in a mass production bakery. Dickensian in magnitude, White Lung is a sardonic portrait of B.C.'s racial conflicts and chaotic economy. Praise for White Lung: "a rollicking black comedy of errors with a host of unforgettable characters" (Quill & Quire, starred review) "rarely has there been a novel as astute about life on the punch clock" (The Globe and Mail) "mordantly funny" (The National Post)