Burrard Inlet

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—where the city meets the mountains, and civilization meets the wild—as a backdrop for characters 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; and 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.

Tyler Keevil is a lecturer in creative writing at the University of Gloucestershire and has published short fiction in a variety of magazines on both sides of the Atlantic, including Brace, New Welsh Review, On Spec, Planet, and Transmission. He is the author of Fireball and The Drive, both of which were short-listed for Wales Book of the Year and won the Media Wales People’s Choice Award.