By Barry Pomeroy

As his life fragments, and he is fired from his job and fights with his girlfriend, Mexican vacations cannot cheer the nameless narrator of In Light of Ray. In desperation, he decides to follow the cryptic advice of Ray, a shadowy figure whose obscure suggestions takes him away from his friends and into unemployment, poverty and then homelessness. Drifting around a grittier Vancouver, he begins to think that the only way to fix his life is to die although this is profoundly disrupted when he meets Weed, a girl abandoned on Wreck Beach. Ultimately affirming, the first novel in the series details a man’s drift from the Vancouver streets and the emptiness of dead-end jobs to a choice between embracing community and connection or disappearing into a waiting squalor. The second novel, Working for Ray, follows these characters as they travel across Canada, and along the way learn how to reconcile their past.