Harvey Reginald MacMillan (1885-1976) is one of the most significant figures in Canadian corporate history. Born into extreme poverty in rural Ontario, MacMillan continued his education after high school and went on to study at Yale. Despite serious setbacks, including a bout with tuberculosis, MacMillan persevered, and in 1912 became the first chi …

Raincoast Chronicles, Spilsbury's Coast, The Accidental Airline, A Hard Man to Beat, The Men There Were Then. . . and now another one to top off the list. Writing in the Rain features the same fascination with British Columbia and the same ability to bring its stories to life that have brought Howard White numerous awards and accolades, including t …

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 …

During the years Al Purdy was becoming one of Canada's best-loved poets, he also wrote and published many pages of distinctive prose. This selection of almost forty years of essays and anecdotes is vintage Purdy. Part I, No Other Country, consists of essays on seeing the world as a Canadian. It begins as a fascinating travel diary as Purdy takes th …

Lonely in a Cool, Sweet Way is the latest collection of poems by a writer whom Al Purdy has compared to Emily Dickinson and Margaret Avison. "I have the sense of seeing things with her eyes and mind," Purdy said in his introduction to her first book, She Reminds Me of Vermeer, "of actually being in her situation, and it's this intimacy that gives h …

Ghost towns looming silently out of the fog, villages torn apart by storms, forest fires fought with "flying boats" as big as jetliners, the Chilcotin War, grizzlies and sasquatches, life in a float camp tethered to a rocky shore - this is Raincoast Chronicles Eleven Up. The book comprises numbers 11-15 of the Chronicles, and about 35 pages of new …

Long known to insiders as one of the most unique personalities in Canadian letters, the celebrated poet Al Purdy begins this story of his life by noting that just as he was about to be born his hometown of Trenton was flattened by a historic explosion as the local munitions factory, "no doubt accounting for any oddity and eccentricity in my charact …

Tom Wayman has been writing and publishing the poetry of everyday life for over twenty years. This anniversary collection gathers the best of Wayman's published work from eleven previous volumes, along with some provocative new poems, in celebration of his commitment to honest, accessible writing with a sense of humour.

Although Wayman laments the d …

in 1984, when Sharon Brown's mother Betty became terminally ill with bone cancer, Sharon and her husband (writer Andreas Schroeder) brought Betty home to live her last weeks with them and their two young daughters. With the help of her family, trusted professionals and close-knit community of friends, Brown helped her mother die with dignity, surro …

Timmy's home is the Strait of Georgia, where he tows barges to BC's tiny logging communities, large port cities and everything in between, in all kinds of weather. Timmy, Captain Jones and the denizens of the west coast people - otters, whales, seagulls - introduce children to the life and work of the BC coast in fun, colourful style.

Short, funny anecdotes from a natural born recycler, do-it-yourselfer, tinkerer and pack rat all rolled into one. They start during the Depression, when young Caplette learned how to make a perfect slingshot and go after gophers in South Battleford, Saskatchewan. They follow him down the road when he gets the bright idea to ride his bicycle to the …

This is a love story; an unlikely convergence of two people from different worlds who were able to make a rich and tender life together, and not only endure each other's company in alarmingly close quarters but revel in it.

Edith Iglauer was born in Cleveland and lived an urban, sophisticated life in New York until she met and married John Daly, a …

In his introduction to this provocative collection of essays, George Woodcock describes his response to a recent question about national unity. "I remarked impatiently that what interested me was not the achievement of 'national unity, but the accomplishment of creative anti-national disunity."

Woodcock argues that if Canadians are angry about their …

Homer Stevens spent half a century in the BC fishing industry, both as a working fisherman and as a leader of the United Fishermen and Allied Workers' Union. His story, an oral autobiography, was recorded and compiled by Rolf Knight.

Stevens grew up in Port Guichon, a poly-glot fishing community on the Fraser River delta. He was one of an extended …

Paperwork, a provocative sampling of the best new work writing in North America, breaks this taboo. These poems are written by people who build houses and machines, catch fish, take care of children, manage companies, work hard at looking for work, and much more. The writing is funny and tough and sad and angry, and the poems come from insiders - m …

In Timmy Ties Up Timmy pulls a load of dynamite from James Island up to Howe Sound. By now Timmy has been towing cargo up and down the coast for 70 years. He is not as young as he once was. As Timmy approaches Howe Sound a fuel line breaks in the engine room and causes a fire. The Coast Guard manages to separate Timmy from the barge load of dynamit …

"MY WIFE HAS GONE CRAZY - one of the isolated upcoast lightkeepers in this astonishing book writes to his Victoria supervisor. "PLEASE SEND SOMEONE UP HERE AT ONCE."
It could be an incident from any one of many poignant stories which unfold as Don Graham, himself keeper of Vancouver's famous Point Atkinson Light, breaks the lighthouse fraternity's …

"Cameron doesn't stop at a wall of despair. Her stories illuminate her faith in compassion and tolerance."
-Vancouver Province

Life isn't easy in Bright's Crossing, the Vancouver Island town where these short stories are set. The locals make their living in the forests, the mines and the ocean; and it is rich strangers in far-off cities who get the …

Another issue of British Columbia's favorite anthology has arrived, and like its predecessors, Raincoast Chronicles 12 features the variety and style that has made the series a BC publishing phenomenon.

It includes stories from established favorites like Jim Spilsbury, Howard White and Edith Iglauer. It touches on subjects ranging from seineboats to …

A novel with many heroines. . .

Some are black, some white; some are babies and some grandmothers. What they have in common is Cassidy, a wealthy and merciless plantation owner in the pre-Civil War American South, for whom the black women are slaves and the white women are concubines.

Their story is the story of thousands of women of their time and p …

One of British Columbia's most colourful figures was Albert "Ginger" Goodwin, a slight young English immigrant who arrived on Vancouver Island in 1910 to join hundreds of others slaving in the hellholes of the Cumberland mines. What he saw there made him one of the most effective labour leaders the province has ever seen, and led to an untimely and …

Once regarded as British Columbia's "voice from the bunkhouse" for his powerful logging poems, Peter Trower, has produced a new collection about life "after the bunkhouse" - seventy new poems about cities and small towns, travel and love.

A sequel to The Queen Charlotte Islands 1774-1966, this volume is an intimate tour of the mystical Charlottes. Beginning at the northwest tip of the islands, nearly 2000 features are presented in geographical sequence. Thus the reader may journey in a natural progression around the more than 150 islands which make up the group. For the spot reader, …

In these magical tales of the Celts, Cameron does for old world mythology what she has done for new world myths in her best-selling Daughters of Copper Woman and Dzelarhons. Cameron adds wit and common sense to symbolism and to the mysteries of life and creation.

An extraordinary new collection of short stories from the author of Dzelarhons and A Whole Brass Band.

Here is an assortment of relationships: lovers, husbands and wives, children and parents, friends; and of strong individuals: Nan, whose frog causes consternation and chaos; Daleth who defies a fundamentalist sect, only to discover that it's hard …

Ethel Wilson has delighted readers with her art, her humour, and her extraordinarily perceptive eye. She turned out six novels and a book of short stories - all highly acclaimed by famous critics and writers and all written after she reached the age of 49.

Mary McAlpine, a close friend of Wilson, has produced a biography that is very personal, humou …

Anne Cameron is well-known for her humourous retellings of North West Coast Indian legends - Daughters of Copper Woman and Dzelarhons. In the present collection of poetry, she enters a darker, more eerie and threatening corner of this world. "The Sickness That Has No Name" is an exploration of alienation and Indian mysticism, and of a woman's deter …

Vancouver journalist-broadcaster Alan Twigg examines Evans' earliest, out-of-print novels and magazine serials, as well as his masterpieces Mist on the River and 0 Time In Your Flight, and his poetry. The plot synopses and criticism make this an important reference guide for students of Canadian literature, and Evans' own comments on his craft prov …

This humourous look back at a neglected part of B.C.'s history will be of interest to those who were there . . . and to those who missed it!

Frozen inkwells on winter mornings, black bears coming to class, and wolves on the trail home in the evening are only some of the trials and adventures that one-room schoolteachers faced in the wilds of B.C. Jo …

A book of long poems about being on the edge, the cost of life and death, and loving.

Peter Trower is a poet known for what he writes about: the lives of west coast loggers, the rural culture of the B.C. Coast, skidroad life in Vancouver, and his personal love of the western landscape. He has established himself as a unique voice, lyircal and regional, a Canadian original. Goosequill Snags is the first major collection of poems sinc …