Grogan's Cafe - Tapa blanda

Loggers call them "the jungles" - the scattered islands and dense rain forests of the BC coast's Knight Inlet area. Young Terry Belshaw swore he'd stay out of them, but when he"s down on his luck and "fresh out of better ideas," he leaves 1950s Vancouver to try his luck in the woods.

As Terry feared, there's only one way to learn to be a logger the hard way. After a series of misadventures - including an intense affair with the sensuous wife of a faller - he ends up on Minstrel Island, the crossroads of Knight Inlet's rough brotherhood of gyppo logging camps. A boozy interlude as a cook in Davie Grogan's dismal cafe offers relief from the backbreaking toil of logging, but when long-simmering lusts and rivalries explode into mayhem at an island dance, Terry goes back to the woods, where GROGAN'S CAFÉ speeds to a powerful climax.

Peter Trower was born at St. Leonard's-on-Sea, England, in 1930. He immigrated to British Columbia at age ten, following the death of his test-pilot father in a plane crash. His mother married a West Coast pulp mill superintendent who drowned soon after. Trower quit school to work as a logger for twenty-two years. Since 1969, he has published more than a dozen books of poetry--from which poems were selected for Haunted Hills & Hanging Valleys: Selected Poems 1969-2004--and contributed to several issues of Raincoast Chronicles and Vancouver Magazine. Poetry collections such as Moving Through Mystery (1969), Between the Sky and the Splinters (1974), The Alders and Others (1969) and Ragged Horizons (1978) express his admiration and resentment at the magisterial power of nature. He has written three novels about the West Coast logging life: Grogan's Cafe (1993), Dead Man's Ticket (1996) and The Judas Hills (2000). In 2002, Trower was awarded the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award and had his name added to the BC Writers' Walk of Fame outside the Vancouver Public Library in recognition of his contribution to BC literature. He lives in North Vancouver, British Columbia with his faithful cat, Hangup.