[1] The Communist's Daughter, published by HarperCollins in Canada and Knopf in the US in 2006, and later in France, the Netherlands, Greece and Poland, is a retelling of the final years in the life of the Canadian surgeon Norman Bethune.
[2] His first novel, The Ash Garden, about various kinds of fallout from the Hiroshima bomb, was published in 2001, and was shortlisted for the Books in Canada First Novel Award and the International Dublin Literary Award, the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Prize, and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize (Regional Best Book).
It won the 2002 Canada-Japan Literary Award and has been published in translation in Spain, Argentina, Japan, the Netherlands, Italy, Germany, France and Greece.
[3] After serving as fiction editor at the literary journal Blood & Aphorisms and holding writing residences at Yaddo, the Banff Centre, and Fundacion Valparaiso, in Spain, Bock published his first book, a short story collection Olympia, in 1998, for which he won the Danuta Gleed Literary Award for the best debut short story collection in Canada, the Canadian Authors' Association Jubilee Award, and the Betty Trask Award in the UK.
He studied English literature and philosophy at the University of Western Ontario, and took one year off during that time to live in Spain.