In Mean Boy (Anchor), the story of nineteen-year-old Larry Campbell, who idolizes a hard-drinking, plaid jacket-wearing, wood-chopping poet named Jim Arsenault, Lynn Coady revels in the Canadian literary scene of the 1970s. This is an affectionate and funny novel that takes us through a year of Larry’s life at Westcock University, during which he tries to figure out how to be a poet, how to hold his liquor and how to navigate the politics of Westcock’s incestuous literary community.

Anyone who has lived in Vancouver for any length of time has watched whole neighbourhoods of gleaming condominiums rise up; no one can quite remember what was there before. Lance Berelowitz, an urban planner, tackles this collective civic amnesia in Dream City: Vancouver and the Global Imagination (Douglas & McIntyre).