June’s strength of character was forged by living in the wilderness west of Turner Valley as a young girl with her mother and her stepfather, Tip Johnson, a renowned cowboy and horse trainer. She learned early to live in harmony with her environment and became a strongly determined woman capable of meeting the challenges of being an artist, horse …

Known to most as a polarizing figure in Canadian and British Columbian politics, and an outspoken voice in print and radio, Rafe Mair shares with his readers the side to him that is entirely human, relatable, and even loving in his latest memoir, I Remember Horsebuns. Above all, Rafe shares his love affair with Vancouver, British Columbia.Starting …

Raise the windsock. Read the compass. Ride where the wind wills it.

Late 2010. From the end of fall to the beginning of winter, Daniel Canty becomes a wind seeker. Aboard the Blue Rider, a venerable midnight-blue Ford Ranger crested with a weathervane and a retractable windsock, he surrenders himself to the fluidity of air currents. The adventure …

In this marriage of memoir and manifesto, Elizabeth May reflects on her extraordinary life and the people and experiences that have formed her and informed her beliefs about democracy, climate change, and other crucial issues facing Canadians. The book traces her development from child activist who warned other children not to eat snow because it c …

A BBC Radio 2 Book Club Pick

For thirty years, Brian Brett shared his office and his life with Tuco, a remarkable parrot given to asking such questions as “Whaddya know?” and announcing “Party time!” when guests showed up at Brett’s farm. Although Brett bought Tuco on a whim as a pet, he gradually realizes the enormous obligation he has to t …

A wide-ranging anthology of Asian Canadian literature to celebrate 20 years of Ricepaper.

2015 marks the 20th anniversary of Ricepaper magazine, a pioneering periodical devoted to Asian-Canadian writing. Over the years, Ricepaper's focus has shifted from predominantly arts and culture reporting to the publication of original literature; as such, it …

For decades, Hudson Mack has been the face of television news on Vancouver Island. In 2004, when he "crossed the street" from CHEK to The New VI, it was an industry-wide sensation. As he recalls that life-changing event in this autobiography he admits he wasn't sure where his new path might lead. CHEK was established, respected and popular in Victo …

A transformative memoir by a queer disabled person of colour and abuse survivor.

Lambda Literary Award and Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction finalist

In 1996, poet Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, carrying only two backpacks, caught a Greyhound bus in America and ran away to Canada. They ended up in Toronto, where they were welcomed by a comm …

Raise the windsock. Read the compass. Ride where the wind wills it.

Late 2010. From the end of fall to the beginning of winter, Daniel Canty becomes a wind seeker. Aboard the Blue Rider, a venerable midnight-blue Ford Ranger crested with a weathervane and a retractable windsock, he surrenders himself to the fluidity of air currents. The adventure …

An ex-police detective’s searing personal account of sexism, racism, and mishandling in the investigation of missing and murdered women.

In That Lonely Section of Hell, police detective Lori Shenher describes her role in Vancouver’s infamous Missing and Murdered Women Investigation and her years-long struggle with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorde …

Frank White started writing the story of his life as a pioneer BC truck driver in 1974 when he was only sixty. His boisterous yarn in Raincoast Chronicles about wrangling tiny trucks overloaded with huge logs down steep mountains with no brakes won the Canadian Media Club award for Best Magazine Feature and was reprinted so many times everyone urge …

In 2007, Caroline Woodward was itching for a change. With an established career in book-selling and promotion, four books of her own and having raised a son with her husband, Jeff, she yearned for adventure and to re-ignite her passion for writing. Jeff was tired of piecing together low-paying part-time jobs and, with Caroline's encouragement, appl …

In its heyday in the 1950s and '60s, the remote community of Elsa, 300 miles north of Whitehorse in the Yukon Territory, was the epicentre of one of the world's most lucrative silver mining operations--an enterprise that far surpassed the riches produced during the iconic Klondike gold rush. For twelve of those years, Gerald Priest was the chief as …

“[Brett’s] writing is so vivid, the observations so telling, that a reader can virtually feel the smooth heft of a collected egg in the palm of a hand or hear the goofy, honking dawn call of the peacock.” —Globe & Mail on Trauma Farm

A raucous biography of a remarkable parrot and an incisive exploration of how we relate to those who are dif …

Bambi and Me consists of 12 autobiographical pieces about how movies shaped the young life of Michel Tremblay, one of their biggest fans. Among others, he talks about Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Cinderella, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Parade of the Wooden Soldiers, Orphée and the Night Visitors and about how each led to his disco …

A novel about a boy with a stutter, and the tangled barbs of repressed memory.

Montreal, 1979. A boy's speech starts to fracture along with the cement of le Stade olympique. Do they share a fault line? Daniel Allen Cox's unconventional fourth novel tells the story of a boy with a stutter who grows up and uses sound to remember the past. A coming-of- …

Covering Rough Ground, Kate Braid's first book, was published in 1991 and awarded the Pat Lowther Award for Best Book of Poetry by a Canadian Woman. Since then Kate has written extensively in prose, poetry and on CBC Radio about her and other women's experiences in the construction trades. Her work has been highly praised by women in almost every l …

This print-on-demand title is available by request from most booksellers.

When Elsie Hulsizer was little, she lived on the shores of Puget Sound in Washington where she spent the summers sailing in a small open sailboat with her parents. Her parents would always start out by sailing to windward, or against the wind, so they would have an easy ride …

One of Canada’s greatest literary figures reflects on life at the centre of Quebec literary arts. Re-examining the influences of her early life in a large, rural Catholic family, Madeleine Gagnon not only explores her rejection of unexamined values as part of her intellectual development but also her refusal to be categorized by her gender.

Karl M …

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 …

Further Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer is a continuation of the columns and essays that comprised Stuart's 2005 release, Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer. Again, equal parts literary memoir, reckless tirade, and unsolicited advice for the aspiring writer, Further Confessions is drawn largely from Stuart Ross's notorious "Hunkamooga" c …

Still sassy, Doris Gregory takes the reader back over seventy years to the time when she broke with tradition, first by publicly challenging the University of British Columbia's discrimination against women, and then by joining the Canadian Women's Army Corps. Her memoir allows us to travel with her across the Atlantic at the height of the U-boat i …

In these inspiring letters to his grandchildren, David Suzuki speaks passionately about their future. He challenges them to speak out and act on their beliefs, explains why sports are important, decries the lack of elders and grandparents in the lives of many people, especially immigrants, and champions the importance of heroes.

The most personal o …

Foot Notes: Telling Stories of Girls' Soccer reflects on 35 years coaching girls' and women's soccer. The book is a bit of memoir, a bit of guidebook, a smattering of literary commentary, a dose of nostalgia and confessional, sprinkled with some sports journalism.

Foot Notes is a tribute to soccer players and coaches, an appreciation of the game …

The World, I Guess is a substantial book, six sections that demonstrate a command of a broad poetic range, a catholic range of interests, and echoes of a lifetime of reading and learning from Pound, Williams, Stanley, and others. The centrepiece is "The Flood," a long, complex, discursive poem whose subject is poesis and whose interest is in the wo …

"Bruce Fogle's sweet, beautifully-written memoir, Barefoot at the Lake, precisely catches the fleeting magic of both adolescence and Canadian summer. Reading it is like peering into a snapshot, taken long ago at a beloved cottage." —David Macfarlane, author of Summer Gone

An idyllic summer at the cottage in the 1950s, as revealed through the eyes …

"Bruce Fogle's sweet, beautifully-written memoir, Barefoot at the Lake, precisely catches the fleeting magic of both adolescence and Canadian summer. Reading it is like peering into a snapshot, taken long ago at a beloved cottage." —David Macfarlane, author of Summer Gone

An idyllic summer at the cottage in the 1950s, as revealed through the eyes …

In the vein of Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, Kara Stanley tells the compelling story of her husband’s life-changing brain and spinal cord injury and the role of music, science, and love in recovery.Part recovery narrative and part love story, interwoven with the latest research on the brain, Fallen describes the aftermath of a life- …

David Chaundy-Smart took it as a compliment when his high school vice-principal told him he was wasting his youth by climbing. Here, he tells the story of how he and his brother, Reg, spent the last years of the 1970s fighting suburban boredom to become, in the words of renowned climbing historian Chic Scott, “one of the leading figures in Ontari …

David Chaundy-Smart took it as a compliment when his high school vice-principal told him he was wasting his youth by climbing. Here, he tells the story of how he and his brother, Reg, spent the last years of the 1970s fighting suburban boredom to become, in the words of renowned climbing historian Chic Scott, “one of the leading figures in Ontari …

In Gold Medal Diary, Hayley Wickenheiser— the most decorated female hockey player in the game— intimately recounts her day-to-day experience of the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. At the heart of the book are Wickenheiser’s revelations about the life of an Olympian— the behind-the-scenes stories, the physical and emotional challenges, an …

In 1980 Elaine Harvey worked for the International Red Cross in the Cambodian refugee camps immediately after the fall of the brutal Khmer Rouge regime. It was a time when sorrow fell like monsoon rain. "I was not a victim of war, poverty, or starvation, but I was a witness. As a witness, I came to understand that front lines take a toll in our liv …

In her lyrical memoir The Death of Small Creatures, Trisha Cull lays bare her struggles with bulimia, bipolar disorder and substance abuse. Interspersing snatches of conversations, letters, blog entries and clinical notes with intimate poetic narrative, Cull evokes an accessible experience of mental illness.

In The Death of Small Creatures, Cull str …

A memoir about fathers and sons, breaking out of gender norms, and reconciling with a dangerous childhood.

Lambda Literary Award finalist

Michael V. Smith is a multihyphenate force of nature: a novelist, poet, improv comic, filmmaker, drag queen, performance artist, and occasional clown. In this, his first work of nonfiction, Michael traces his ear …

In Birth of a Bookworm, Michel Tremblay takes the reader on a tour of the books that have had a formative influence on the birth and early development of his creative imagination. Included are his readings of and reactions to some of the great classics of world literature by such writers as the Comtesse de Segur, Jules Verne, Robert Louis Stevenson …

"The short pieces in One Story, One Song remind us of human beings� place in the world: We are a part of it, not masters of it. And by sharing our stories we share ourselves. By listening to others� stories, we share their lives and perhaps gain connections. One Story, One Song is all about connections, something we all need."
—Globe an …

It is the spring of 1963. The young Quebec author Marie-Claire Blais, bursting with energy and talent, has just won a coveted Guggenheim fellowship. She chooses Cambridge, Massachusetts, as the place where she will begin her writer’s apprenticeship with her mentor, Edmund Wilson.
American Notebooks is much more than a fascinating autobiographical …

Finalist 2015 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Award for Non-Fiction

Finalist 2015 Lambda Literary Award "It would be one thing for me to leave, another entirely for her to be taken away."

Cease, the tough-and-tender debut memoir from Alberta writer Lynette Loeppky tells the story of a young woman who has decided to leave an eight-year relationship. …

A diminutive cowboy with a full beard and a Texas drawl stands onstage at Expo 86 in Vancouver telling wild and woolly stories of life in the Chilcotin backcountry. The audience is mesmerized by his poetic ballad of an alcoholic dog that rode on the back of his saddle in Anahim Lake. The performer is Luther Corky Williams.

Originally from Texas, Cor …

When 25-year-old Jo climbed down the ramp of the freighter Canadian Star to set foot in Vancouver, BC, in the summer of 1967, she’d never heard of log salvaging. But within two and a half years, the immigrant from England would quit her teaching job and join forces with one of the most enigmatic salvagers of the Sunshine Coast. Dick and Jo Hammon …

In Keith Billington’s The Last Patrol, he shares one of the most tragic stories of the far north.

It was a quiet December morning in 1910 when Inspector Fitzgerald and his crew left Fort McPherson, Northwest Territories, on a dog team patrol to Dawson City, Yukon. Their departure was without fanfare, and after a brief handshake and a salute, the m …

An exciting travel adventure, as the author explores darkest Scotland, equatorial Africa, remote Tibet, rainsoaked Tofino, and inner Struthers. Victoria film maker and writer Andrew Struthers borrows the language and visual layout of the Victorian travelogue to tell his own tale in Around the World on Minimum Wage. While the stories Struthers regal …

Born Out of This follows Christine Lowther’s journey from the unutterable loss of her mother to the discovery of her own poetic voice through deep reflection and her intimate connection to the coastal rainforest. She looks back on her mother’s poetry and activism. She recalls the day the police arrested her father, and the indifferent beauty su …

Salmon: A Scientific Memoir investigates a narrative that is important to the identity of the Pacific Northwest Coast – the salmon as an iconic species. Traditionally it’s been a narrative that is overwhelmingly about conflict. But is that always necessarily the case?

The story follows John Steinbeck’s advice: the best way to achieve reality i …