Captain Ed Shields tells the comprehensive history of the North Pacific codfish industry, shedding light on the lives of the men who sailed to the Bering Sea in search of cod from the 1860s until 1950. He describes the work that went into preparing the fishing fleet for five months on the high seas and ensuring that the ships came back safely with …

"Merv Wilkinson and Wildwood, his small patch of forest, provide powerful evidence that a forest can be logged while its integrity is maintained in perpetuity. In speaking out against current industrial clear-cut logging practices, Merv has become a genuine Canadian hero. Uncompromising, tough, fearless and with a wonderful sense of humour, he is …

There may be no other sailing ship in North America that has touched the lives of so many people during 80-plus years of existence as HMCS Oriole. The design of famed MIT marine architect George Owen, the pride of original owner George Gooderham, commodore of the Royal Canadian Yacht Club, the steadfast training ship of the Royal Canadian Navy for …

City of Vancouver Heritage award winner, 2003

Frank Gowen's Vancouver extended from White Rock to the Sunshine Coast, as the photographer and his camera explored the playgrounds and edifices of a vibrant West Coast community. In the city itself, Stanley Park, and particularly the park's famed Hollow Tree, became Gowen's personal domain.

In this er …

Lotus Land's scandals of the past 130 years may seem to be all about money, but there's also been sex, corruption, staggering incompetence and outright lies. Jump aboard as veteran political junkie William Rayner explores BC's scandal-ridden history. Read about the comely juror and the murder suspect, the two politicians who fell in love on the jo …

Buying Saffron, a 24-foot racing sailboat, was an act of desperation meant to help single parent June Cameron and her youngest son validate themselves. It did that and more. A friend persuaded June to race the boat, and over the next decade June, either solo or with her all-female crew, competed in BC's major sailing races, taking home a lot of the …

This book, the first to be written about the Lake Babine Nation in north-central British Columbia, examines its traditional legal order, self-identity, and their involvement in current treaty negotiations.Changing relations between the First Nations and the Canadian state have led to a new awareness of customary legal orders. These orders can help …

The Canadian North is witness to some of the most innovative efforts by Aboriginal peoples to reshape their relations with “mainstream” political and economic structures. Northern Quebec and Labrador are particularly dynamic examples of these efforts, composed of First Nations territories that until the 1970s had never been subject to treaty bu …

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 …

This fourth collection of short stories written by Robert James (Jim) Challenger combines the timeless appeal of Aesop's fables with the oral storytelling traditions of First Nations and other cultures. Each story stimulates conversation about the moral woven within.

Go along on Salmon's journey. Learn how Hermit Crab found a new home. Discover why …

Philip Resnick explores what makes B.C. stand apart as a region of Canada. He looks at the views of politicians, opinion-makers, and ordinary British Columbians on the challenges posed by Quebec nationalism, on their sense of estrangement from central Canada, and on what they see as the future of Canadian unity. He concludes with an examination of …

Battles over human rights, curriculum issues and hiring and promotion practices reveal to what extent efforts to integrate ideas of academic freedom and the inclusive university have engendered strife and debate on Canadian campuses. For some, the concept of academic freedom has become its own myth – an icon to be revered, an article of faith, an …

The essence of democracy is the peaceful and legitimate transfer of government. In 1995 in Ontario, the omens for a successful transition weren’t promising. Almost no one had expected Mike Harris’s Common Sense Revolution to catapult his Progressive Conservatives from third-party obscurity to victory in the June election. The Harris manifesto d …

In Citizens Plus, Alan Cairns unravels the historical record to clarify the current impasse in negotiations between Aboriginal peoples and the state. He considers the assimilationist policy assumptions of the imperial era, examines more recent government initiatives, and analyzes the emergence of the nation-to-nation paradigm given massive support …

"One of Canada's best poets ... Robertson's language is sparkling and sharp, and builds momentum through its rhythmic motion motion to produce a dense and difficult, but enjoyable and readable book ... The Weather rewrites the pastoral with confidence and cunning."
— Prairie Fire
"Hip, cerebral, streamlined, and dense, The Weather is about many …

In this thoughtful collection of essays edited by Debra J. Salazar and Donald K. Alper, forest policy in the U.S. Pacific Northwest and British Columbia is examined in a binational context. While US and Canadian forest policy and forest management approaches differ, the two countries face similar challenges and conflicts. Contributors discuss the e …

In recent years, the forests of British Columbia have become a battleground for sustainable resource development. The conflicts are ever present, usually pitting environmentalists against the forest industry and forestry workers and communities. In an effort to broker peace in the woods, British Columbia’s NDP government launched a number of prom …

Diane "Honey" Jacobson's latest book is an important comment about First Nations efforts to save the salmon and her personal youthful journey to find meaning and a sense of place in life. Like the style in her first book My Life in a Kwagu'l Big House, Diane's style in My Life with the Salmon is full of action, amazing adventures and fascinating co …

The Essential Stankiewicz gathers together a selection of the core materials from a lifetime of writing by one of the most eminent political philosophers of our time. Written in a clear and lucid style, this volume can be appreciated by both the professional political scientist and the educated layman interested in the concepts and issues that have …

'The Inanimate World' is an affecting suite of stories, with a novella-length piece at its core. The stories within 'The Inanimate World' traverse both rural and urban landscapes, exploring the terrain of the personal as much as the geographic. They span the time period of 1980 to the present, providing relevant insights into the private lives of p …

At the Edge is a rich and evocative call to action at a time when new ideas are urgently needed. Mandatory reading for policy analysts and decision makers in the public, private, and volunteer sectors, it will be equally useful to scholars, teachers, students, and others interested in creating sustainable societies. Throughout the world, biophysica …

Stone Rain is a triptych that investigates what it means to see. In particular, the set of three lyrical sequences asks how the artist-observer, the urban witness, and the foreign traveler all shape the world as the site of story.

In Storyboards, a Northwest Coast Mask Exhibit serves as inspiration for lyric poems in which the poet imaginatively re …

Winner of the 2001 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing.

Daniel Poliquin's mordant, polemical essay-novel created a storm upon its publication in Quebec in the fall of 2000. Not only did this Franco-Ontarian take on every sacred cow of Quebec nationalism, he did it in an outrageous and extremely witty manner. Poliquin has created two ficti …

Lucy sets off on an adventure to find her father who has been captured by pirates. Lucy and the Pirates is a rollicking, rambunctious adventure story set in the days when pirates sailed the seas and no traveller was safe. Glen Petrie's text and Matilda Harrison's richly-detailed illustrations combine to create a period piece of great authenticity a …

A pressing issue today is how to compensate Aboriginal peoples for the infringement of their rights. Aboriginal rights include more than a title; within the fiduciary relationship between the federal government and Aboriginal peoples is the issue of compensation for the infringement of Aboriginal and treaty rights. In an historical and legal contex …

The largest of BC's southern Gulf Islands, beautiful Salt Spring Island has long been a favoured holiday destination and a prized real-estate area for those in search of an idyllic rural residence. Now available in trade paper, Salt Spring: The Story of an Island chronicles the island's rich history from the days when Coast Salish people inhabited …

When people talk about the joys of gardening, they're usually referring to the flora rather than the fauna. But the pleasures of the garden are often accompanied by creatures who likely have not been invited: slugs, aphids, spiders, beetles. But they're nothing to be afraid of: they're all part of a fascinating natural world right beneath your feet …

This exquisite cookbook instructs the epicure-boater on how to make magnificent gourmet meals using only a limited galley pantry and plenty of fresh food from the ocean: from spicy Haw Mog Hoy (mouthwatering spicy steamed mussels with a touch of Thailand) and Coquilles St. Jacques (a delectable creamy scallop dish), to a Sesame Seed Crusted Halibut …

Zoë Landale's new collection of poetry is remarkable for its fusion of rocky hardness with the luminosity of coastal British Columbia. As a poet, Landale has the lyric ability to evoke the particular with such warmth and grace that one cannot help becoming aware of a spiritual dimension.

Browsing in his grandfather's study, young Jamie discovers a notebook entitled "This Was My War" and finds himself pulled into the life of East End London teenagers whose adolescent years were overtaken by the devastation of World War II. As Jamie follows his grandfather's story in which "war" changes from silver screen exploits to bombs exploding …

Ronsdale Press offers a new edition of Steveston, this much loved work by two of Canada's finest poets and photographers. For this edition, Daphne Marlatt has written a new poem, never before published, to offer a postscript from 2001 on the original 1974 undertaking. At the publisher's request, Robert Minden has returned to his photographic archiv …

Butterflies are found everywhere in British Columbia. Written for butterfly watchers, butterfly gardeners, naturalists, and biologists, Butterflies of British Columbia will provide years of enjoyment for the butterfly enthusiast.

The Butterflies of British Columbia

• provides the most complete coverage of species and subspecies of any North America …

Throughout her life, Mildred Osterhout Fahrni walked with J.S. Woodsworth, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. She heard Ghandi tell the British of his dream of a free India in 1931. When the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation was born in Regina in 1933, Fahrni was there. As a reporter she covered the founding of the United Nations in San Fran …

About 10 years ago, George Bowering and Linda Hutcheon came up with the idea for a short fiction collection called Likely Stories: A Postmodern Sampler. It was a great idea at a time when a lot of people were still trying to figure out what “postmodern” actually meant.
That fine collection of stories has now gone out of print, and George Bower …

The long poem, nowadays, is the talk of various discourses with each other: “A poem is a small painting, a long poem is a mural.”

The second edition of The New Long Poem Anthology is an irreplaceable roadmap of a vital and powerful poetic form, a record of the most seductive and sustained “singing talk” in postmodern Canadian writing. Edited …

In 1895, the arctic explorer Captain Ian Ryder has let his house in Blackpool on the Nova Scotia coast to the recently married Clara Weiss, who is about to become the compass of a social circle far too intimate for its own good. Lost in a maze of obsessive Victorian pseudo-science and its ignorant fascinations with violence, spiritualism, the rean …

Doyle has a very funny problem: he hears too much. He can hear the most intimate details of the lives of everyone living in his apartment building. He can tell the temperature of a young neighbour’s bath water by the resonance of her pipes; he knows where the old lady’s lost teeth are by the way they rattle in their glass when her appliances t …

Connie Fife is one of Canada’s warrior poets. Poems for a New World, her third book of poems, refuses to take prisoners. She writes of Oka and Gustafson Lake, of the police shooting of a Native mother and child, as well as the NATO genocide in Yugoslavia. Reflecting on her own life, she carves out a space for new forms of loving that will act as …

Crows Do Not Have Retirement, David Zieroth's sixth book of poems, explores the many lives of the spirit and the flesh: lives that challenge, bewilder and excite. With the fluidity of language and sharpness of image that he is known for, Zieroth voyages through the conflicting worlds of dream and everyday life, exploring feelings of extreme self-ir …

Having barely survived a brain aneurysm two years earlier, fifteen-year-old Adrien, working at her Aunt Erin's summer camp, is caught between the land of the living and the spirit world, unsure where she belongs. As she struggles to understand the message delivered by the spirits of the five young women that only she sees, she learns of the tragic …

Trying to land a spot on the South Side Middle School football team isn't the biggest challenge Matt Hill faces in the third installment of this popular series. Besides catching passes and dodging defenders, Matt also has to deal with the return of his estranged father following a ten-year absence. But while Matt comes to grips with forgiving his f …

The four volumes of The Birds of British Columbia provide unprecedented coverage of BC's birds, presenting a wealth of information on the ornithological history, habitat, breeding habits, migratory movements, seasonality, and distribution patterns of each of the 472 species of birds. The text is supported by hundreds of full-colour pictures, includ …

This much-awaited final volume of The Birds of British Columbia completes what some have called one of the most important regional ornithological works in North America. It is the culmination of more than 25 years of effort by the authors who, with the assistance of thousands of dedicated volunteers throughout the province, have created the basic r …

In this revised edition, Dr T.C. Brayshaw describes all of the aquatic monocotyledons in British Columbia. (Monocotyledons are a major subgroup of flowering plants that have embryos with only one seed leaf.) This group comprises four orders and fourteen families of plants in freshwater and marine environments. The most populous families are the pon …

Annis May Timpson demonstrates how Canadian women’s calls for family-friendly employment policies have translated into inaction or inappropriate action on the part of successive federal governments. She focuses on debates, public inquiries, and policy evolution during the Trudeau, Mulroney, and Chrétien eras, contextualizing these developments w …