Chris F. Needham of Vancouver has worked as a bouncer, bartender, forklift driver, computer technician and magazine editor. An Inverted Sort of Prayer is his first novel. Promotional materials state: "Cut loose at the end of a long and violent hockey career prolonged by steroids and numbed by liquor, ex-enforcer Billy Purdy discovers that the soon-to-be-published novel of a celebrated politician's son is in fact Billy's father's own, taken word for word from the original published, and promptly forgotten, some forty years before. Allowing the ruse to continue, and in an effort to distance himself from his violent past, Purdy embarks upon an exotic, oftentimes comical adventure in an attempt to reinvent himself in what he envisions to be a more cerebral and civilized image, in a world he has never fully been a part of, or developed the necessary tools to properly inhabit. Yearning for connection of any kind, yet seemingly unable to sustain it for any length of time, Billy Purdy comes to symbolize the alienation, frustration, and ultimate futility behind this quintessential Canadian dream." In Falling from Heights, Needham's follow-up to An Invented Sort of Prayer, he delves into controversial drug experiments in Toronto in 1972, sponsored by government.

DATE OF BIRTH: 22/03/1969

PLACE OF BIRTH: Surrey, BC

BOOKS:

An Inverted Sort of Prayer (Now or Never Publishing Co., 2006). ISBN 0-9739558-0-5

Falling from Heights (Now Or Never Publishing Co., 2007; $21.95). 978-0-9739558-1-1

[Now or Never Publishing Company at #704, 1460 Barclay St, Vancouver, BC Canada V6G 1J5.]

[BCBW 2007] "Fiction"