Blood Sports, a novel by Eden Robinson

[Eden Robinson]

Blood Sports by Eden Robinson

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Review in the Manitoban
April 12, 2006
http://www.umanitoba.ca/manitoban/2005- ... sports.php

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Review in the Georgia Straight
by John Burns
January 12, 2006
http://www.straight.com/content.cfm?id=15245

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This eagerly anticipated new novel is Eden Robinson’s most satisfying, disturbing, and addictive to date.

Blood Sports is the tough, gritty story of the brutal cat-and-mouse relationship between two cousins, set in Vancouver’s Downtown East Side.

Tom, a young man, hardly innocent, has been caught up over the years in Jeremy’s world of drugs, extortion, and prostitutes, while Jeremy, vindictive, vicious, either protects Tom or uses him, but always controls him. Added to the mix is Paulie, a junkie two years clean and Tom’s girlfriend, and also the mother of his daughter. This lethal triangle shifts when word gets out Tom has been talking to the police, and men from the past who have a lot to lose reappear. Suddenly Tom and Paulie are pawns in a much larger game, with everything at stake.

With the storytelling skill and engrossing characterizations that have made her previous books so popular, Robinson keeps the tension humming in this riveting novel. This is Eden Robinson at the height of her powers.

Co-sponsored by McClelland & Stewart Publishers.

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AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Eden Robinson is a thirty-six-year-old Haisla woman who grew up near Kitamaat, BC. Her acclaimed, bestselling first novel, Monkey Beach, won the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, was a Giller Prize finalist, and was longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Her collection of stories, Traplines, was awarded the Winifred Holtby Prize for the best first work of fiction in the Commonwealth, and was a New York Times Editor's Choice and Notable Book of the Year.

One of Eden Robinson’s biggest literary influences has been Stephen King, whose books she read compulsively between the ages of ten and fourteen, when she started writing her own stories. “I was a bookworm, right from the beginning. When I got bored of classes, I’d skip them and go to the library.” Later, studying creative writing at the University of Victoria, Eden says she flunked in fiction and blossomed in poetry. “My first-year poetry professor was Robin Skelton. He was a bit late for class and showed up wearing a pentagram ring. I thought –hey, cool.”

Robinson grew up with her older brother and younger sister (CBC-TV anchor Carla Robinson) in Haisla territory near Kitamaat Village, surrounded by the forests and mountains of the central coast of British Columbia. They were children of a mixed marriage–her Haisla father met her Heiltsuk mother during a stop in Bella Bella in his fishing days. Kitamaat, a Tsimshian word meaning “people of the falling snow,” (and not to be confused with nearby Kitimat town), is home to seven hundred members of the Haisla nation, with another eight hundred or so living off-reserve.

After earning her B.A., Eden Robinson moved to Vancouver to look for work that would allow her to spend time writing. A late-night writer, she ended up taking “a lot of McJobs” –janitor, mail clerk, napkin ironer. She decided to enter the masters program at the University of British Columbia after having a short story published in its literary magazine PRISM international. Traplines was her first book, a collection of dark and brutal stories that feature a deadpan, gritty humour. While Eden was finishing work on the book, her paternal grandmother died; Eden feels the knowledge of real grief affected her writing. The book was published in 1996 and won the UK’s Winifred Holtby prize.

Eden holed herself up in her Vancouver apartment to write Monkey Beach. Though she had written a novella before (Traplines is composed of just four stories, one over 100 pages long), Eden had to work hard at the structuring of her first novel. The result is compelling and complex; The Washington Post called it “artfully constructed,” the National Post deemed it “intricately patterned.” Critics in the US, the UK and Canada were unanimous in their appreciation of the book.

Eden Robinson is one of Canada’s first female Native writers to gain international attention, making her an important role model. She enjoys travelling, and supported herself with travel writing in Europe before the publication of Monkey Beach.

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"Long in the works, Robinson's sought-after second novel about extortion and other forms of human manipulation, is set in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside amid drugs and prostitution."

Blood Sports, a novel by Eden Robinson
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart

This eagerly anticipated new novel is Eden Robinson’s most satisfying, disturbing, and addictive to date.

A new novel from one of our best young writers, Blood Sports is the tough, gritty story of the brutal cat-and-mouse relationship between two cousins — Tom and Jeremy Bauer — set in Vancouver’s Downtown East Side.

Tom, a young man, hardly innocent, has been caught up over the years in Jeremy’s world of drugs, extortion, and prostitutes, while Jeremy, vindictive, vicious, either protects Tom or uses him, but always controls him. Added to the mix is Paulie, a junkie two years clean and Tom’s girlfriend, and also the mother of his daughter. This lethal triangle shifts when word gets out Tom has been talking to the police, and men from the past who have a lot to lose reappear. Suddenly Tom and Paulie are pawns in a much larger game, with everything at stake.

With the storytelling skill and engrossing characterizations that have made her previous books so popular, Robinson keeps the tension humming in this riveting novel. This is Eden Robinson at the height of her powers.

“I was born on the same day as Edgar Allan Poe and Dolly Parton. I am absolutely certain that this affects my writing in some way.”
—Eden Robinson

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Read more about the author
http://www.abcbookworld.com/?state=view ... or_id=2556

Author's Profile
http://www.bookrapport.com/profiles/eden_robinson.html

Monkey Beach
http://www.quillandquire.com/authors/pr ... le_id=1656

Traplines
http://www.quillandquire.com/reviews/re ... iew_id=784

Eden Robinson was the recipient of the Alumni Association of the University of Victoria, 2001 Distinguished Alumni Award . . .
http://alumni.uvic.ca/awards/alumni/robinson.htm