Raised on an apple orchard in Vernon, B.C., UBC Creative Writing graduate Adam Lewis Schroeder became a teacher of Creative Writing at Okanagan College in Penticton on the strength of his first collection of short fiction, Kingdom of Monkeys (Raincoast), nominated for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award. His stories take the reader from 19th century Singapore to wartime Bali and an opium den in modern-day Thailand. The final story is a reworking of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness in which Kurtz is found alive and well. The decaying set of Apocalypse Now has become a shrine for a Brando cult among the locals.

Schroeder's first novel Empress of Asia (Raincoast 2006) evolved from his curiosity about his grandfather's generation and World War II. At the deathbed of his beloved wife Lily in 1995, the protagonist/narrator Harry Winslow receives the address of Michel Ney, a man who had saved his life in World War II and was assumed to have been killed by the Japanese. He proceeds to investigate Michel and Lily's fifty-year-old secret, recalling his own whirlwind courtship with Lily in bombed-out Singapore during World War II and travelling to contemporary Thailand.

In All-Day Breakfast (Douglas & McIntyre, 2015) a grade eleven field trip to the plastics factory goes awry when the students and their teacher, widowed dad Peter Giller, get sprayed with unidentified pink goo. The goo's side effects initially seem harmless - sawdust-scented B.O. and extreme bacon cravings - but eventually escalate to fingers falling off, elimination of the need to pee and an inability to read. As the story progresses and teacher Giller's behaviour becomes more bizarre, he loses custody of his own children to his mother-in-law. In a bid to get his kids back and his condition cured, Giller crosses the country, encountering "pinstriped bureaucrats, affectionate farm girls and monsters plucked from mythology"; along his journey. As promotional materials note "All-Day Breakfast will satisfy all appetites for the visceral, the violent and the hilarious."; All-Day Breakfast was shortlisted for the 2016 ReLit Award in the novel category.

BOOKS:

Kingdom of Monkeys (Raincoast) 1-55192-404-8
Empress of Asia (Raincoast 2006) $29.95 1-55192-987-2
In the Fabled East (D&M 2010) $29.95 978-1-55365-464-3
All-Day Breakfast (D&M 2015) $22.95 978-1-77162-064-2

[BCBW 2016] "Fiction"