Blood Sports - Softcover

"Robinson's sting worked precisely as the trickster in her intended. . . . Like Leonard Cohen, Robinson combines a variety of narrative forms and conflicting styles with such a high degree of technical virtuosity that the very act of reading a cracked and splintered narrative becomes spellbinding, addictive, unstoppable."
--Globe and Mail

"Eden Robinson writes with the violent beauty of a seasoned knifefighter. . . . In her hands, language is a weapon that can leave you bleeding, unsure of just how you were cut. Reading Eden Robinson feels dangerous."
--National Post

"Blood Sports is a stomach-churning sucker punch of a read for a very talented risk taker."
--NOW magazine

"A gripping page-turner of a tale. . . . Blood Sports is a novel of extreme, even diabolical contrasts that explore by the awful and the beautiful faces of Vancouver. . . . Robinson imbues her novel with continual suspense, carnal voyeurism, and of course, hope."
--Calgary Herald

"Blood Sports is both startlingly original and highly emotionally engaging."
--Winnipeg Free Press

"In print, Robinson is Poe on smack: dark, disturbing and frequently bloody. . . .With spare, taut writing and scenes of torture that would make Spanish Inquisitor Torquemada proud, Robinson has conjured up gripping, page-turning horror in the vein of early Stephen King."
--CBC Arts Online

"Blood Sports is very good: exciting, unexpected and clever."
--Georgia Straight

"Eden Robinson writes some of the most disturbing fiction that Canadian literature has ever seen."
--Quill & Quire

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
From the Hardcover edition.