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The Survival of Arrival: A Review of Sharon Bala’s The Boat People

The Boat People
Sharon Bala
Penguin Random House
Review by Anjalika Samarasekera

In the second half of The Boat People, a Sri Lankan immigrant—and former Tamil Tiger—poses a question to his Canadian-born niece: “What do you think happens when you terrorize a people, force them to flee, take away their options then put them in a cage all together?” (230).

The question is the ravaged heart of Sharon Bala’s remarkable debut novel, which chronicles the arrival of around 400 Tamil refugees on the coast of British Columbia in 2010. The refugees have fled persecution in Sri Lanka following the end of the twenty-six-year civil war and have come to Canada hoping for a warm welcome. These hopes are dashed when the Canadian government detains the refugees on the suspicion that some of them belong to the LTTE, also known as the Tamil Tigers, a listed terrorist organization. Eventually, some refugees are released and deemed “admissible” to Canada while others are deported back to Sri Lanka.

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Despite the Odds: a Review of Project Compass

Project Compass
Lizzie Derksen, Matthew Stepanic, Kristina Vyskocil, Robert Strong
Monto Books, 2017
Review by Peter Takach

What do you get when you take four emerging Edmonton writers and give them each a quadrant of their city to explore? In Project Compass, publisher and editor Jason Lee Norman has assembled a crack crew to take readers on an odyssey through a city that, despite producing its fair share of writers, is rarely the explicit setting of their stories. The result is an engaging and emotionally-arresting collection of four concurrent novellas that all unwind on June 21, 2016. Starting from the north, south, east, and west, we follow four Edmontonians as they wander their way through the longest day of the year and reflect on the paths they have taken.

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The Story Behind The Story: The Decedent by Yuly Restrepo Garcés

Yuly Restrepo photographed by David Wheeler

Our winter issue will be arriving soon, and includes a story by Yuly Restrepo Garcés, a writer and professor at the University of Tampa. A MacDowell Fellow, Yuly is also the recipient of a VONA/Voices Fellowship. Her fiction has appeared in Zone 3 and is forthcoming in Natural Bridge. Of her story, “The Decedent,” Yuly says:

I started to write “The Decedent” in May 2015, at the Ft. Lauderdale airport, during a seven-hour layover, though I had been thinking about it for at least a year before that. I wrote about twelve pages while I waited for my flight to Medellín, where I would spend the summer months visiting family and working on a rough draft of my novel-in-progress. The story itself is a convergence of several things I had been preoccupied with in the months before I started writing.
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