If Diana Krall can make it big from Nanaimo, so can Craig Taylor... As a child, visiting his grandmother's summer cottage on Lake Simcoe each year and gazing at an aerial photo of London, he had always wondered, "What kind of person ended up in London?" Now he edits a literary journal in London called Five Dials. At age 36, to coincide with the London Olympics in 2012, Taylor published the private viewpoints of 90 Londoners from all walks of life for Londoners: The Days and Nights of London Now - As Told by Those Who Love It, Hate It, Live It, Left It, and Long for It (Ecco / HC $33.99), a journalistic undertaking he describes as "a novel with 90 different narrators" due to its kaleidoscopic approach. "It would have been hubristic to come to this place and write about it like I knew it," said Taylor, who only moved to London in 2000. His first book, Return to Akenfield, is an update on Ronald Blythe's 1969 portrait of a small English village.

[BCBW 2014]