It is rare for a single work of sculpture to become the subject of a book at any time, much less at the moment of its installation. But Bill Reid's Spirit of Haida Gwaii is no ordinary sculpture. Commissioned for the courtyard of the new Canadian chancery in Washington, DC, it sits directly across the street from the National Gallery and is destine …

This is an intimate story of biology student developing both his knowledge of the prairie falcon and his own philosophical outlook on the natural world. Author Bruce Haak shares his passion for the prairie falcon and its habitat in this fascinating story of his journey to understand and record the behavior of this spirited bird of prey. Bruce Haak …

A kaleidoscope of aviation stories from a former bush pilot. Bush Flying: The Romance of the North offers readers a kaleidoscope of aviation stories from former bush pilot Robert Grant. Having logged more than 12,000 hours of flight time in the wilds of Canada, Grant takes the reader with him on his travels from coast to coast to coast. From advent …

A hilarious, illustrated account of life in the previously sleepy town of Tofino, during the heated controversy over the proposed logging of BC's Clayoquot Sound. The Green Shadow, which was originally serialized in the Georgia Straight, earned Struthers a 1995 National Magazine Award for Humour and a nomination for two 1995 Western Magazine Awards …

Chiwid was a Tsilhqot'in woman, said to have shamanistic powers, who spent most of her adult life "living out" in the hills and forests around Williams Lake, BC. Chiwid is the story of this remarkable woman told in the vibrant voices of Chilcotin oldtimers, both native and non-native. Chiwid is number 2 in the Transmontanus series.

British Columbia — the last temperate part of the New World to be mapped — has long conjured up images of Utopia, a word that comes from the Greek "no place." Indeed, utopian experiments started springing up soon after the first European explorers passed through. In All Possible Worlds, Justine Brown explores the attraction BC holds for utopian …

When Frank Turnbull came from Toronto to join the staff of the Vancouver General Hospital in 1933 as a brain surgeon, he automatically became Chief Neurosurgeon because he was the only one in the province. When he retired at 81 he was among BC's most distinguished physicians, in sharp contrast to his early years, when regular physicians considered …

The theme of the individual's sense of alienation and search for meaning in life is once again the main concern of acclaimed novelist and poet Goh Poh Seng. The chief protagonist Ong Kian Teck, a gifted, hard-working creative designer in an advertising firm, epitomizes the successful Singaporean. Yet as Kian Teck's daily life unfolds we see an inte …

Who was the goalie to captain the Canadiens?
What season did the Rocket score 500 goals in 50 games?
Who scored the first goal ever in the Montreal forum?

Montreal Canadiens: The Hockey Trivia Handbook is bursting with fill-in-the-blanks, true-or-false and mulitple-choice quizzes and questions to test the mettle of even the most hardened Habs fan. …

Gordon Davies is one of British Columbia's foremost anglers and outdoor story writers. In Living Rivers, Davies tells of fishing the great rivers of British Columbia. More than a book of fishing stories, Living Rivers also serves as a guide. Each chapter includes photographs, directions to the river and to the best fishing locations, the types of f …

The Adam's River sockeye run is one of the natural wonders of the world. Every October, the river turns red as hundreds of thousands of mature, scarlet?humped sockeye salmon return from the Pacific Ocean to spawn and die in the same gravel beds where they hatched four years earlier.

Adam's River tells the story of the salmon's epic journey far out i …

When two thousand British bank clerks, butchers, housewives, saleswomen, remittance men and ex-Boer War soldiers followed the charismatic but inept Anglican minister, Isaac Barr, to the Canadian prairies in 1903 their rallying cry was "Canada for the British."

Despite the Canadian governmentís expectations and Barrís assurances, however, very few …

On 2 January 1988, Canada and the United States signed what was then the most comprehensive free trade agreeement the world had ever seen. This book is the story of those FTA negotiations, the preparations for and conduct of the negotiations, as well as the ideas and issues behind them. From their unique perspective as participants, Michael Hart, B …

In the manner of a good fireside chat with a favourite aunt or uncle, Life in the Cariboo chronicles the Lees' life in one of BC's most rugged areas. We hear about swamp ranches, education by mail, life before universal TV. Best of all, there are tales of some of the Cariboo's legendary - almost mythical - characters, such as Annie Basil and the ki …

His books with Howard White made a bestselling author out of Jim Spilsbury - the BC coast's legendary pioneer, painter, photographer, aviator, inventor and raconteur. Now all three volumes of the Spilsbury saga are available in trade paperback!

Jim Spilsbury bought an airplane in 1943, when wartime restrictions prevented the use of his boat to visit …

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 …

Great Canadian hockey stars aren't born, they're made - many of them, like Bobby Clarke, in the teams that make up the Western Hockey League. This first history of the WHL, tracing the league from its establishment in the 1960s to the present day, has all the stories of all the teams, coaches and stars: who they are (or were), how their skills deve …

Long admired by nature lovers and marine scientists, the sea otter is extraordinarily well adapted to the sea, where it can spend its entire life span eating, sleeping, giving birth and rearing its young without ever coming ashore. Richly illustrated, The Nature of Sea Otters is both an authoritative natural history and a visual celebration fo this …

This early non-fiction work by critically acclaimed novelist Elizabeth Hay displays the qualities that have resonated with readers — the pitch-perfect register of human psychology, the clear, unsentimental yet intimate sentences — in her bestselling novels A Student of Weather, Garbo Laughs, Late Nights on Air, and Alone in the Classroom. Capti …

Once again northern Canada's best-known storyteller takes us on a tour of the town of New Totem on the "Vast Northern Prairie." We meet again with the Trotter family and their friends in this second book of tall tales based on growing up in the Peace River country. A hilarious collection of nineteen short stories, The Ice Cream Bucket Effect makes …

Finalist, Bill Duthie Booksellers' Choice Award (1993).

"Chilcotins, they never got beat. Never got beat." — Henry Solomon, in Nemiah: The Unconquered Country

Those words were true in 1864, when the Tsilhqot'in Nation were among the very few First Nations peoples to win a war against European settlers (the Chilcotin War). They were true in 1990, wh …

The Empress Has No Closure contains, as a centre-piece, the “Alefbet Transfers,” a meditative, spacial explication of the 22 figures of the Hebrew alphabet.

Originally published in 1977, Contact and Conflict has remained an important book, which has inspired numerous scholars to examine further the relationships between the Indians and the Europeans – fur traders as well as settlers. For this edition, Robin Fisher has written a new introduction in which he surveys the literature since 1977 and commen …

As a young man living in England at the time of the Allied Landing at Dieppe, Canadian novelist and screenwriter Ernest Langford acquired a special affection for the Canadian soldiers who fought so valiantly and suffered so harshly in the ill-fated raid.

On August 19,1942, Major-General J. M. Roberts led 5000 troops of the 2nd Canadian Infantry Divi …

Crossing Canada by rail has long been among the travel wonders of the world, but in 1990 government cutbacks forced the remarkable Canadian to make its last run from Vancouver to Toronto. Amid the political controversy that raged during the last years of the route's existence, Terry Pindell covered 18,000 miles of Canadian rails. In this fascinatin …

Robert Zend's eleventh book continues his wonderfully surreal explorations of the mind trapped in the paradoxes of time and space. This posthumous edition includes a Foreword by John Robert Colombo and an Afterword by Northrop Frye.

From 1942 to 1949, a group of innocent Canadians were uprooted from their homes and businesses on the west coast, dispossessed, and forced to disperse across Canada, merely on the basis of their Japanese ancestry. Some 4,000 were even exiled to wartorn Japan.
These injustices remained unresolved for nearly forty years. Then in the 1970s, a handful …

Here is the latest issue of an enduring legend on the BC coast, packed as usual with articles, stories, tall tales, photographs and drawings by people who know and love the raincoast. From bush pilots and lightkeepers to logging and fishing, the subjects in this anthology are fascinating history and plain good reading. Contributors include Howard W …

In savage blizzards, blinding whiteouts and 60-below-zero temperatures, steel axles snap like twigs; brakes and steering wheels seize up; bare hands freeze when they touch metal. The lake ice cracks and sometimes gives way, so the roadbuilders drive with one hand on the door, ready to jump.

John Denison and his crew waited for the coldest, darkest d …

Beautifully illustrated by BC folk hero Bus Griffiths who wrote and illustrated the popular comic book Now You're Logging, Patrick and the Backhoe is a classic story of decency and guts triumphing over arrogance and greed.

Patrick lives in a little town on the side of a high mountain. Patrick's mother and father own the town bookstore, and his broth …

This book concentrates on twenty-three sightings in Alberta and British Columbia. Was it merely an Indian legend told to early explorers, a story characteristic of the native's mythical culture? Or, were the stories of giant hairy man-like apes actual reports of an animal that has managed to mystify its researchers and elude western civilization fo …

In a land such as the Yukon, with its colorful past matched by its colorful characters, tales abound of the perils and adventures experienced by those hardy sourdoughs who first pioneered the country. Many are the tales that have been told in the still of the un-equalled splendor of a Yukon evenings while gathered around the campfire with close com …

"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 …

Seasoned tale-spinner Arthur Mayse has combined a vivid setting with an involving and suspenseful plot, and the result is a classic juvenile book and a memorable west coast story. Fourteen-year-old Paddy sets out to make the money handlining off the coast of British Columbia, and finds it a more daunting prospect than he thought. Setting up camp on …

This book is drawn from Haida Monumental Art, the most important work yet published on Haida culture. Chiefs of the Sea and Sky presents an overview of extensive research carried out by archeologist George MacDonald in the 1960s and 1970s to document the history of the Haida villages of the Queen Charlotte Islands.

In this abridgement, MacDonald re …

Joseph Tussman’s The Burden of Office is a book about the nature of political authority. Consider the symptoms of our present dilemma: leadership reduced to media “sound bites,” legitimate public power sold off to the marketplace in the name of “privatization,” citizens transformed into dubiously literate consumers in a Global Village. Ca …

Once again, Kathleen Dalzell has captured the mystery and the adventure of the Queen Charlotte Islands. In this, her third book on the islands, Dalzell focuses on her parents, free-spirited pioneers who risked everything to settle on the islands they loved. The result is a story that is both fascinating and informative, a look at history from the i …

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 …

From Shakespeare to cop shows, sitcoms to docudramas, for over three decades the CBC has presented viewers with every variety of television drama and has become Canada's closest equivalent to a national theatre. Turn Up the Contrast is the first book to explore the content of Canadian television drama and is both a critical analysis and a survey hi …

On January 22, 1979, an eleven-year-old Native girl died of a ruptured appendix in an Alert Bay, B.C. hospital. The events that followed are chronicled here by Dara Culhane Speck, a member by marriage of the Nimpkish Indian Band in Alert Bay. She has relied mainly on interviews, anecdotes and public records to describe how this small, isolated Nati …

Who would have suspected the power of bubble gum? Atlas is bored. It's raining, so he sits inside, chewing a gumball. He blows a bubble and imagines that it is Australia. Then the stove becomes a Chinese dragon; the fridge is Antarctica, inhabited by penguins; the bathtub melts away into the Seven Seas; and the piano turns into an African elephant. …

When Ethel Wilson published her first novel, Hetty Dorval, in 1947, she was nearly sixty years old. With her following books, she established herself as British Columbia's most distinguished fiction writer and one of Canada's best loved and most studied authors. Although she enjoyed and even encouraged her reputation as an unambitious latecomer who …

In this disturbing collection of investigative fictions, Brian Fawcett asserts that the informational white noise of the Global Village is creating a cultural and intellectual breakdown that will eventually lead to the disappearance of local and individual identity. He argues that under the glitzy surfaces of television and the information “revol …

The Book is a story of survival and hope in the Central Canadian Arctic. Father Raymond's first hand accounts of survival and life with the Eskimo. For twelve arduous but captivating years, Raymond de Coccola was, for all intents and purposes, a Barren Land Eskimo. Trained as an Oblate missionary, he ministered to the people of the Central Canadian …

The Canadian Yearbook of International Law is issued annually under the auspices of the Canadian Branch of the International Law Association (Canadian Society of International Law) and the Canadian Council on International Law.

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 …

Kids will love The A to Z of Absolute Zaniness. While their parents read the six-line alliterative captions, children will be dazzled by the bold, colourful drawings illustrating each letter with objects, animals, and people.

Carol Mills wrote the short stories that describe the bizarre feats of people and animals, real and ridiculous. Susanne Ferri …

A fun way to learn about those sea creatures swimming in the tidal pools.The stories in this book are fun. They are delightful to read or to listen to. Any child from the age of five to ten years, or for that matter anyone who is young in heart, will enjoy them. But fun and enjoyment is only part of the value of this book. The book is filled with i …