A Grin Without a Cat: A Novel

About the Book

The Cheshire Cat might well have been talking about modern urban life when it told Alice, “we’re all mad here.  I’m mad.  You’re mad…You must be…or you wouldn’t have come here.”

It is a Nother rainy Monday morning in Vancouver and the newspapers are all screaming about a mysterious phenomenon called “Golden Gate North.”  As the traffic winds itself up for another rampage through the city, a young girl is picked up from her school by the Ministry of Social Services.

A Grin Without a Cat concerns itself with the efforts of a single mother, Diana, to be reunited with her daughter, Rachel, after the child is seized following allegations of abuse.  The novel takes place in Vancouver, BC, and is as much about the city itself as the characters who inhabit it.

A Grin Without a Cat’s cast of characters includes Craig, a disgruntled shipping clerk, a psychotic 7-11 clerk named Berry, an absent-minded English professor, various bureaucrats and misfits along with an interesting organization called the Vancouver Suicide Watch.

Alternately sardonic and tragic, A Grin Without a Cat is a Dickensian take on early twenty first century life in a major North American city.

About the Author

Adrian Barnes lives in Rossland, BC. He is married with two sons. This is his first novel.