Finalist, Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize (BC Book Prizes)

Finalist, City of Vancouver Book Prize

Long listed for CBC Canada Reads 2015

The Door Is Open is a compassionate, reflective, and informative memoir about three-and-a-half years spent volunteering at a skid row drop-in centre in Vancouver’s downtown eastside. In an area most renowned for its …

In this lavishly produced volume, Joseph Plaskett has created a prose "life in art" as colourful and vital as his finest paintings. He begins with his early life in New Westminster, BC, at a time when there were no private galleries.

Lawren Harris and Jock Macdonald were among his early mentors, and they helped him to win the first Emily Carr schola …

A publishing oddity, Death Writes: A Curious Notebook is both what you might expect--a handwritten notebook with doodles in the margins and clippings in the back; and what you might not expect--the perspective of Death him/herself, ruminating about the land of the living.
This unusual, stylish book is Death's personal notebook, which has been une …

At the dawn of the twentieth century, Vancouver was a mill town rapidly becoming a bustling cosmopolitan seaport. New technology proliferated, Klondike miners brawled their way through town, political turbulence and dramatic boom-and-bust cycles were the norm, Then as now, Vancouver was young, thriving, magnificently beautiful, and troubled by seri …

The Wastell family had much to contend with on a daily basis. Besides running a sawmill and surviving in very un-genteel circumstances, Norris's mother, a registered nurse, was the only source of medical help in the community. Not surprisingly, she had to treat all types of ailments ranging from pneumonia to severed fingers and deliver numerous bab …

Lost in North America is a caustic, humourous exploration of a Canada we don’t often talk about-a collective mental creation of great charm and complexity, hovering precariously somewhere in Video North America, in disguise as the most successful colony in the history of the world. Lost in North America is a personal, idiosyncratic tour of the co …

In 1860, at the age of fourteen, Susan Louisa Moir left England for British Columbia. After settling initially at Hope, she lived briefly in both Victoria and New Westminster, then B.C.’s two most important settlements. Returning to Hope, she helped her mother open the community’s first school, and in 1868 she married John Fall Allison, riding …

For one year in her life, Mary Meigs and her long-term lover and friend, Marie-Claire Blais, lived in a ménage à trois with the beautiful and powerful “Andrée.” After the end of their stormy three-way relationship, both Marie-Claire and Andrée, who are fiction writers, embodied their memories in novels. The Medusa Head comes from the third …

Taking as her alter-ego Lily Briscoe–the painter in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse–Mary Meigs paints a portrait of herself, her family and her friends in Lily Briscoe: A Self-Portrait, a book that is both autobiography and memoir. In it, she describes the three major decisions of her life: "not to marry, to be an artist" and to listen to he …