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Phone: (250) 595-4232
Fax: (250) 595-1458
#111-1644 Hillside Ave.
Victoria, B.C. V8T 2C5
New Releases
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May the Fourth Be With You!
We here at Bolen Books would like to wish you a jolly Star Wars day this May the 4th! To help you celebrate we’re giving away a copy of Vader’s Little Princess! Stop into the store and enter to win with any purchase of anything. Anything at all! Contest is open until May the 5th.
If you haven’t seen Darth Vader and Son or Vader’s Little Princess before, you definitely have to come in and check them out. They’re hilarious! And also rather charming. Perhaps a great father’s day gift for the dad who can empathize with Lord Vader’s parenting skills.
We originally wanted to give away a live Bantha, but you can imagine the many reasons that idea didn’t work out.
May the 4th be with you!
Win A Night At The Opera!
It’s spring, and that means it’s time for Tosca, the marquee event of Pacific Opera Victoria‘s 2012-2103 season — and we want you to be there!
Bolen Books, a longtime supporter of POV and their world-class work, is giving away a pair of tickets to EVERY performance of Tosca, running at the Royal Theatre over the first two weeks of April.
That’s right, two tickets for EVERY performance.
Enter at the front desk at Bolen Books, and you could be in for an unforgettable night!
BC Book Prize nominees!
It’s one of our favourite times of the year: BC Book Prize season!
The nominees for this province’s top literary prizes were announced yesterday. Click over to the BC Book Prize website for the full list of nominees, but we would like to draw special attention to the Victoria area nominees (including Yasuko Thanh, C.P Boyko, Bill Gaston, and Patricia Young) and the numerous nominees who have visited us at Bolen Books in the past (including Jackson Davies, Derek Hayes, Anakana Schofield and John Lakich).
Best of luck, and our congratulations, to all of the nominees!
The Women’s Prize for Fiction Longlist Announced
Wait – what is this, a new prize?
Well, not really.
The Women’s Prize for Fiction is basically a placeholder name for the prize that was once The Orange Prize, with Orange having withdrawn their funding last year. Organizers say that this year’s prize is supported by a number of corporate backers, and that “The Women’s Prize for Fiction” will be renamed shortly once a primary supporter is confirmed.
All that aside, the big news is that the longlist for the not-Orange Women’s Prize for Fiction was announced in London late yesterday afternoon our time. And what a list it is!
Kitty Aldridge – A Trick I Learned From Dead Men
Kate Atkinson – Life After Life
Ros Barber – The Marlowe Papers
Shani Boianjiu – The People of Forever are Not Afraid
Gillian Flynn – Gone Girl
Sheila Heti – How Should A Person Be?
A M Homes – May We Be Forgiven
Barbara Kingsolver – Flight Behaviour
Deborah Copaken Kogan – The Red Book
Hilary Mantel – Bring Up the Bodies
Bonnie Nadzam – Lamb
Emily Perkins – The Forrests
Michèle Roberts – Ignorance
Francesca Segal – The Innocents
Maria Semple - Where’d You Go, Bernadette
Elif Shafak – Honour
Zadie Smith – NW
M L Stedman – The Light Between Oceans
Carrie Tiffany – Mateship with Birds
G Willow Wilson – Alif the Unseen
“Eclectic” is the word that comes to mind: this is a list of old favourites (hello, Barbara Kingsolver and Zadie Smith) and prize powerhouses (Hilary Mantel‘s Bring Up the Bodies has already won the Booker and the Costa prizes), books that have yet to reach these shores (we’re all eagerly awaiting Kate Atkinson‘s Life After Life, due April 2) and books that have been around for years (Sheila Heti‘s How Should a Person Be? was published in Canada in 2010). And it gives us great pleasure to see Gillian Flynn‘s Gone Girl longlisted: a fantastic book that was also a customer favourite AND a bestseller.
It’s a great list, and I don’t envy the judges the task of narrowing these titles down to a manageable shortlist, let alone a single winner!
Breaking news!
You have to give them credit: when the publishing industry shakes off its turkey and two-weeks-off post-holiday torpor, they do it with style.
Two big, big publishing stories are making the rounds this morning.
The first? Well, “big” doesn’t really do it justice.
Break out your turtlenecks and decoder rings: It was announced on NBC’s The Today Show this morning that almost four years after his last book, The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown would publish his new novel Inferno on May 14.
The publishers aren’t saying much, except to hint that the novel is set in Italy, and revolves around a mystery involving Dante‘s Inferno.
Oh, and did we mention that the book will feature Robert Langdon, hero of Angels & Demons, The Lost Symbol, and the uber-selling The Da Vinci Code?
Details? Who needs em?
New Dan Brown, May 14. Mark your calendars now.
And give us a call to reserve your copy of Inferno now – it’ll be 20% off the moment it arrives!
The second piece of breaking news is a little closer to home.
The Writers’ Trust of Canada announced the shortlist for the 2013 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing. The nominees are:
Marcello Di Cintio for Walls: Travels Along the Barricades
Taras Grescoe for Straphanger: Saving Our Cities and Ourselves from the Automobile
Noah Richler for What We Talk About When We Talk About War
Jeffrey Simpson for Chronic Condition: Why Canada’s Health-Care System Needs to be Dragged into the 21st Century
Peter F. Trent for The Merger Delusion: How Swallowing Its Suburbs Made an Even Bigger Mess of Montreal
The winner of the $25,000 prize will be announced March 6.
And how was your morning?
Canada Reads: The Final Five!
The final five competitors for Canada Reads 2013 were announced by Jian Ghomeshi (that recent visitor) in Toronto this morning.
Nicknamed “Canada Reads: Turf Wars“, the 2013 instalment features five judges, each defending a book from a different region of the country.
From west to east, the books and panelists are:
Olympic medal-winning wrestler Carol Huynh will champion Richard Wagamese‘s Indian Horse (the most recent of the books on the list, and one of my favourite reads of this year), representing BC and the Yukon.
Ron MacLean, perhaps in search of something to do in the absence of hockey, will be rooting for David Bergen‘s The Age of Hope, from the Prairies and North.
Historian and biographer Charlotte Grey is in the corner of Jane Urquhart‘s novel Away, representing Ontario.
Actor, writer and producer Jay Baruchel will defend the Hugh MacLennan‘s Two Solitudes, a Canadian classic, from Quebec.
And comedian Trent McClellan will represent Lisa Moore‘s novel February, the entry for the Atlantic region.
Canada Reads: Turf Wars unfolds in the new year — start reading now!
Spalding, King win GGs!
As befits an award of its stature, the Governor General’s Literary Awards are big. Big as in “notable”, and big as in “voluminous”.
In fact, there were 14 Governor General’s Literary Awards presented this morning (notably? Women collected ten of the fourteen). That’s too many to highlight in a simple blog post, but the complete list is here, at the Canada Council’s website.
We would, however, like to draw special attention to two of the prizes:
Linda Spalding was awarded the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction (English) for her novel The Purchase (which Samantha has been raving about, and has had as a Staff Pick here since reading it a few months ago), and Ross King was awarded the Governor General’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction (English) for his stunning Leonardo and The Last Supper.
Congratulations to all the nominees, and the winners.
Kids’ Corner!
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Cobble Hill Puzzles
