Jack Hodgins begins The Invention of the World with a ferry worker waving you aboard a ship that will take you not only to Vancouver Island but into a world of magic. The far west coast of Canada has always been regarded as a "land's end" where the eccentrics of the world come to plot out the last best utopia. Hodgins both invents a world and shows how we continually invent that world in all its multiplicity.Past and present intermingle while hilarious farce rubs up against epic tragedy. Intertwined are a love story, a portrait of a nineteenth-century village, a clash between wild loggers and weight-watching town folk who have to wear a pig when they fail to meet their weight goals. Pagan myths rub shoulders with the harsh pioneer days of the British Columbia rainforest.As always with Hodgins, this novel is based on the portrayal of character. At the centre of the mystery is Donal Keneally, the mad Irish messiah who eighty years ago persuaded an entire Irish village to...

With The Barclay Family Theatre, his second collection of short stories, Jack Hodgins introduces us to a cast of characters who transform the everyday world of Vancouver Island into a wondrous world of human warmth and comic energy. There is Barclay Desmond, caught between the ambitions of his mother, who wants him to become a concert pianist, and his father who wants him to follow in his steps as a logger. There is Mr. Pernouski, a real estate agent and the fattest man to ride a B.C. ferry, who believes he can offer his clients their heart's desire. Hodgins also takes us abroad to Ireland and Japan to watch as his people attempt to reinvent themselves in new theatres of action. Through it all, Hodgins depicts his people struggling to centre themselves as their world rocks them into new and unforeseen directions.

Fiction. In Jack Hodgins' new novel, CADILLAC CATHEDRAL, he is at his humorous best in describing the eccentric but lovable characters in the little town of Portuguese Creek on Vancouver Island. Arvo is the main figure, a Finn who has worked in logging camps all his life and who now spends his retirement fixing old cars, often ones that he finds discarded in the bush. Along with Arvo there is a collection of friends who meet at Arvo's garage to discuss the world as it passes by on the highway. When news arrives that one of their oldest friends has died, Arvo and his friends decide to drive down island to pick up the body and give it a decent send-off. A road trip ensues, but this is not just any road trip, for it takes place in a refurbished Cadillac Cathedral, a remarkable hearse built by Cadillac in the 1930s and which has been discovered in the hills where it has been used as a skidder for pulling logs. On the way south, at a slow pace as befits the stately Cadillac Cathedral, the friends encounter adventures that create detours into country life. We learn about the unusual marriages that keep couples apart and together, as well as how male camaraderie develops. There is also a winsome widow with her eye on Arvo as they make the journey south together, and another mysterious widow in the capital for whom it seems that Arvo may still have a soft spot. The journey ends back in Portuguese Creek, with a party that brings the entire community together in a wake to end all wakes. CADILLAC CATHEDRAL grew out of a song narrative that Hodgins wrote for Chor Leoni to perform in January 2014.

The Master of Happy Endings is a powerful new novel about memory, belonging, helping others, and the vagaries of the human heart. It is also a compelling story about how a man in his late seventies manages to conjure one more great adventure for himself.Axel Thorstad lives in a shack on a remote island off the coast of British Columbia. Once a popular school teacher and thespian who touched the lives of hundreds of his students, he now lives in retirement and mourns the recent death of his wife.But even this stoical giant of a 77-year-old finds the isolation too much. He begins to run want ads in newspapers offering his services as a tutor, and meets the indomitable Mrs. Montana. She hires Axel to coach her precocious teenage-TV-actor son Travis for his school exams while he shoots a new episode in Hollywood.  Life in L.A. is far removed from his isolated life in rural B.C., and soon Thorstad finds himself caught up in the drama of his young student’s life, and the return of an old flame.Set amidst the fleshpots, sound-stages and dining rooms of L.A., this engaging novel of lives and loves lost and found also gestures to the courage one needs in the face of the vulnerabilities of older age that all too soon beset us.Review“Hodgins has a rare gift for creating characters at once familiar and larger than life….Hodgins continues to live up to his billing as one of the finest storytellers in this or any other country.” (The Globe and Mail )"...one of this country's great virtuoso writers." (The Vancouver Sun )“An irresistible novel about the vagaries of youth, old age, Hollywood, family and the marvel of keeping going”. (Alice Munro ) About the AuthorJack Hodgins was raised in Merville, on Vancouver Island. He has written seven novels and three short story collections, including Spit Delaney’s Island and The Invention of the World.  Hodgins’ fiction has won numerous awards, including the Governor General’s Award. He and his wife Dianne live in Victoria, BC.

Jack Hodgins' first book, published originally in 1976, is once again in print — in a new edition. Winner of the Eaton's Book Prize and nominated for the Governor General's Award, Spit Delaney's Island, a collection of short stories, put Vancouver Island on the map as a Canadian literary locale and set Hodgins off on his literary career.Hodgins' prose brings Vancouver Island to life in its touch, its taste and the sound of its dialects — a determinedly real world. At the same time he imbues his people with a sense that there is something more that they cannot see but which they sense and strive towards — a mystery or even magic that they can almost touch but which remains forever elusive.Often compared to Faulkner's fiction of the deep South, Hodgins' stories develop through people who seem to live at the edge of the world, always in danger of falling off that edge. There is Spit himself, the keeper of a steam locomotive that has been exiled to Ottawa for...