“Are we going to be a resort town for the super-rich from all around the world, or a functional, integrated city?” wonders the essayist and comedian Charles Demers near the end of Vancouver Special, his witty and deeply anxious meditation on the past, present, and future of Canada’s “most livable” city. To live in Vancouver right now is to accommodate yourself to the slightly uncanny feeling that your future here depends less on anything you do than on the invisible hand of the global market.

Or not so invisible: from the pretty west-side neighbourhoods where Teslas practically outnumber Toyotas, to the humbler precincts where a crappy bungalow will still set you back a million and a half dollars, just about every corner of Vancouver bears the imprint of global capital. The flood of foreign investment since the late 1990s — mainly in the form of property speculation, first from nervous Hong Kong residents, pre-handover, and, much more intensively over the past few years, from newly prosperous China — has transformed the city. Forget the Vancouver Canucks and the ski hills whose clean, well-lighted slopes beckon from the North Shore suburbs; real estate, as Douglas Coupland observes in City of Glass, his wry hometown homage, is “Vancouver’s biggest sport … disturbingly central to the civic psyche”.

If this particular anxiety doesn’t much concern novelists and poets, remaining for now the imaginative domain of elegant worriers like Demers (as well as noted urbanists the Real Housewives of Vancouver), it’s because Vancouver, at barely 130 years old, has always been a city in transition.

Alice Munro … came to a sober provincial town in the 1950s. Photograph: Rex/Sipa USA

Nobel laureate Alice Munro, arriving in the 1950s, found a sober provincial town that little resembled the shiny not-quite-metropolis of luxury condos and esoteric sports cars we know today. Its moody weather and mountain vistas, as commanding then as they are now, weren’t much to her taste. Some of that chilly perspective can be found in the beautiful and melancholy stories of The Love of a Good Woman (1998) and Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001). She decamped to nearby Vancouver Island in the early 60s, on the cusp of a breakthrough in her writing just as the city was on the cusp of the countercultural era from which its popular image as an easygoing mecca of progressive politics and potent pot first took root.

The image endures, even as the Vancouver brand, now global, thanks to the Economist and the 2010 Winter Olympics, has evolved to include yoga, dim sum, and the entertainment-industrial complex. Timothy Taylor’s novel Stanley Park explores the tension between local and global through the travails of Jeremy Papier, a chef determined to make a mark on the city’s gastronomical scene with his “radically rearguard” locavore cuisine. To keep his struggling restaurant afloat, Papier sells a majority stake to the owner of a global coffee conglomerate, flames out, and finds redemption in an illegal pop-up restaurant. If that sounds a little on the nose, Taylor enlivens the material with a restless curiosity and knack for well-turned phrases.

Madeleine Thien chronicles the lives of immigrant families in the brilliant, subtle stories of Simple Recipes. Coupland’s Hey! Nostradamus imagines a Columbine-like school shooting in the sleepy suburb of North Vancouver. Doretta Lau’s fresh and funny collection How Does a Single Blade of Grass Thank the Sun? includes a story where people are assailed by text messages from their future selves and another that turns a gang of stereotype-flaunting Asian teenagers loose on Vancouver’s unsuspecting suburbs. On the nonfiction front, Alisa Smith and JB Mackinnon’s locavore manifesto The 100 Mile Diet merits mention for its quintessential Vancouverness.

But the city’s progressive politics and proud multiculturalism belie a darker, troubled history. From the rise of the racist Asiatic Exclusion League in the early 1900s, to the brutal crackdowns on organised labour during the Great Depression and internment of Japanese-Canadian residents during the second world war, to the ongoing neglect of First Nations communities, Vancouver has been shaped by class and cultural conflict, by its successive, anxious encounters with otherness.

Joy Kogawa … witness to one of Vancouver’s shameful chapters.

In her autobiographical novel Obasan, Joy Kogawa recreates one of these shameful chapters from the perspective of a Japanese-Canadian girl called Naomi Nakane. Hers is one of the thousands of families forcibly relocated from the city and interned as “enemy aliens” in camps hundreds of miles from home. Told in a restrained, lyrical style, the novel traces with tenderness and dawning trepidation Naomi’s childhood journey from innocence to tragedy. A staple of high school English classes, Obasan still has the power to turn this reader into a hot mess of tears.

The Jade Peony, by Wayson Choy, offers a different perspective on the same era. An intergenerational tale set in Chinatown during the 1930s and 40s, it follows Jook-Liang, Jung-Sum, and Sek-Lung, siblings who are Canadian by birth but second-class citizens by the laws of the day. Resented but less reviled than their Japanese neighbours, the trio are torn, to various degrees, between the “old ways” of their parents and grandparents and the contradictory promises of assimilation.

Lee Henderson’s The Man Game is a sort-of historical novel that conjures 1880s Vancouver, whose opium dens, brothels, and logging camps full of migrant labourers anticipate the depredations of the Downtown Eastside, the city’s still-open wound where poverty and addiction fester in the shadow of gentrification more than a century later. The elegant linked stories of Nancy Lee’s Dead Girls have as their backdrop the arrest and trial of a serial killer reminiscent of Robert Pickton, the real-life predator who in the 90s and early noughties stalked and killed sex workers in the area, many of them First Nations women. Unfolding with frosty precision, these stories unsettle.

Conspicuously absent here is the Great Vancouver Novel. The city has inspired many good books, but no municipal epic — no Crossing the Brooklyn Ferry or Ulysses or even In the Skin of a Lion, Michael Ondaatje’s great prose poem about Canada’s other “most livable” city (and Vancouver nemesis), Toronto. What seems to unite Vancouver’s literary output is an almost compulsive need to historicise coupled with an aversion to myth-making. Whether this is a function of the extreme youth of the city or a (very) Canadian modesty about grand narratives, I couldn’t tell you. But who knows? Maybe, just maybe, the present real-estate crisis will turn out to be the muse Vancouver needs. Assuming anyone can afford to stay and write the thing.

Tyler Stiem is a Vancouver writer and photographer. His reportage, travel writing, and radio documentaries have appeared in Newsweek, Vice, the Globe and Mail, Walrus, VQR, Hazlitt and on CBC Radio. You can find him on Twitter @strange_shores.

Readers recommend

Malcolm Lowry wrote scathingly of Vancouver development/gentrification, and lovingly of the then-undeveloped Indian Arm, from his Dollarton cabin, in his short fiction and October Ferry to Gabriola. –OldCreoleBonVivant

I recently enjoyed Adrian Barnes ’s Nod, set in a post-apocalyptic West End and downtown, with key scenes on the Lions’ Gate Bridge and on a freighter commandeered from English Bay! –OldCreoleBonVivant

Douglas Coupland ’s Girlfriend in a Coma is quite a good depiction of 70’s West and North Van. –OldCreoleBonVivant

And a favorite kids’ book : Mister Got to Go by Lois Simmie, set in and around the Sylvia hotel to the steady beat of perpetual rain. And raccoons. –OldCreoleBonVivant

Hands down the book Vancouver by the late reporter Eric Nicol. A mixture of humour and history, tells the story of Vancouver from the time when the Whoi-Whoi lived at what is now Lumberman’s arch, through the sixties. –interiorbc

A small but interesting novel about Vancouver is One Hundred Days of Rain by Carelin Brooks , a meditation on the break-up of a marriage and all the variations of rain that fall on the city. –jmschrei

Another Vancouver book worth checking out is Amber Dawn’s How Poetry Saved My Life: A Hustler’s Memoir. It’s a tough, funny, and sometimes sad of account of her journey from sex worker to successful writer. She’s also a great reader, if you ever get a chance to see her live. –strange_shores

Burning Water, for which George Bowering won a Governor General’s Award for it in 1980. It’s an hilarious and masterful revisioning of Vancouver’s “discovery” of the city, a land already inhabited, thank you very much. –mountainsandsea

• This article was amended on 23 October 2019. Due to a production error involving a word-swap browser extension, the term Great Depression was inadvertently changed to “Clutch Plague”. This has been corrected.