About BC Books Online
BC Books Online was created for anyone interested in BC-published books, and with librarians especially in mind. We'd like to make it easy for library staff to learn about books from BC publishers - both new releases and backlist titles - so you can inform your patrons and keep your collections up to date.
Our site features print books and ebooks - both new releases and backlist titles - all of which are available to order through regular trade channels. Browse our subject categories to find books of interest or create and export lists by category to cross-reference with your library's current collection.
A quick tip: When reviewing the "Browse by Category" listings, please note that these are based on standardized BISAC Subject Codes supplied by the books' publishers. You will find additional selections, grouped by theme or region, in our "BC Reading Lists."
Description
After plans to live in Africa shatter, young journalist Laurie Sarkadi moves to the Subarctic city of Yellowknife seeking wilderness and adventure. She covers the changing socio-political worlds of Dene and Inuit in the late ‘80s—catching glimpses of their traditional, animal-dependent ways—before settling into her own off-grid existence in the boreal forest. There, she experiences motherhood and its remarkable synchronicities with the lives of caribou, dragonflies and other creatures.
As a mother, and as a journalist, Sarkadi speaks up for abused women and children, creating controversies that entangle her in long, legal battles. When she looks to animals and the natural world for solace, she encounters magic. Lessons from the natural world arrive weekly, if not daily: black bears roam her dreams, as well as her deck, teaching introspection; wolves inspire her to persevere.
This evocative memoir explores a more than two-decade long physical and spiritual journey into the wild spaces of northern Canada, around the globe and deep within.
Editorial Reviews
…there is much to contemplate in Sarkadi’s beautifully rendered chronicle of career, motherhood and marriage.
— Liane Faulder, Edmonton Journal
It’s like Eat, Pray, Love but for wild people. Voice in the Wild ends up being about family, social justice, child protection, the environment, music, love… and all with a deep, evolving, spiritual, authentic connection to the land and animals.
— Loren McGinnis, CBC North Radio
Everybody has experiences of things that aren’t supposed to be able to happen, and suspicions of truths to be found in folklore and mythology, as well as in the many stories from around the globe about animals. Laurie Sarkadi dares to tackle such events, stories and intuitions, speaking of them from her own considerable experience as a wife, mother and journalist living for twenty years ‘off-the-grid’ in the Northwest Territories, as well as from her early life as a young world traveler. From the mountain gorillas of Rwanda to the bears of Canada’s North, Laurie Sarkadi has gathered lore and applied it to her own experiences. Readers will be surprised and fascinated by this unusual, truth-telling, often funny and beautifully rendered memoir.
— Sharon Butala
This is a fascinating juxtaposition of scientific precision, professional challenges and intimate personal memoir. Underlying it all, and somehow blanketing it, is the story of a kindred relationship with the natural world, with its infinite power to fascinate a child, define a place, shape a life and teach anyone who is able to watch and listen closely. The dedication of such beautiful stories to residential school survivors is a rich irony. Some 150,000 of them spent their childhoods deprived of the very things that make up the heart of this book: their mothers, their families, their belief that anyone cared about them, and a connection to their lands.
— Marie Wilson
