Drawn to Sea
In the early 1980s, Yvonne Maximchuk, a single mother of two, was living in Whiterock, BC, and making a living as a working artist and art instructor. Then she fell in love with Albert, a crab fisherman who fished the waters of Boundary Bay. Drawn to his seemingly idyllic life and her desire for connection with the natural world, Yvonne and her chi …
Fishing the Coast
Here, at last, is a book about commercial salmon fishing, by well-known fisherman and industry analyst Dr. Don Pepper--one that is sure to become a West Coast classic. Pepper fished salmon as a crewman every season from 1953 to 1969. After a hiatus in the '70s, he returned to fishing in the '80s, balancing his life at sea with a career as a profess …
Lauren Yanofsky Hates the Holocaust
Lauren Yanofsky doesn't want to be Jewish anymore. Her father, a noted Holocaust historian, keeps giving her Holocaust memoirs to read, and her mother doesn't understand why Lauren hates the idea of Jewish youth camps and family vacations to Holocaust memorials. But when Lauren sees some of her friends—including Jesse, a cute boy she likes—pla …
The Girl With No Name
The riveting account of a girl who was abandoned in the jungle and lived among monkeys
In the early 1950s, in a remote mountain village in South America, as a small girl Marina Chapman was abducted while picking pea pods near her home. Her kidnappers then abandoned her deep in the Colombia jungle, and for approximately the next five years she lived …
The Girl with No Name
The riveting account of a girl who was abandoned in the jungle and lived among monkeys
In the early 1950s, in a remote mountain village in South America, as a small girl Marina Chapman was abducted while picking pea pods near her home. Her kidnappers then abandoned her deep in the Colombia jungle, and for approximately the next five years she live …
Fishing the River of Time
At age eighty, Tony Taylor journeys from Sydney, Australia, to British Columbia to fish the Cowichan River with his eight-year-old grandson, Ned. The trip is an opportunity for Tony to return to a landscape that has had a profound effect on his life and his way of thinking, and to share this place with his grandson. As Tony teaches Ned the patient …
Rosina, the Midwife
Finalist for a 2014 Alberta Literary Award
Between 1870 and 1970, 26 million Italians left their homeland and travelled to places like Canada, Australia and the United States, in search of work. Many of them never returned to Italy. Against this historic backdrop comes the story of Rosina, a Calabrian matriarch, who worked as a midwife in an area wh …
How Poetry Saved My Life
Vancouver Book Award winner; Lambda Literary Award finalist
A memoir about sex work and sexuality, and how writing became the author's lifeline.
Amber Dawn's acclaimed first novel Sub Rosa, a darkly intoxicating fantasy about a group of magical prostitutes who band together to fend off bad johns in a fantastical underworld, won a Lambda Literary Awar …
Cold Comfort
When his father died, award-winning poet and curator Gil McElroy was given a box of photographs that documented his father’s military career. Beginning in the Second World War and continuing right through to the end of the Cold War, the senior McElroy staffed Canada’s network of electronic defence, including the Distant Early Warning Line – a …
Paddling to Where I Stand
The first-ever biography written about a woman of the Northwest Coast's Kwakwakawakw people, Paddling to Where I Stand presents the memoirs of Agnes Alfred (c.1890-1992), a non-literate noble Qwiqwasutinuxw woman of the Kwakwakawakw Nation and one of the last great storytellers among her peers in the classic oral tradition. Agnes Alfred documents t …
Journeywoman
Since women started working in the trades in the 1970s, very little has been published about their experiences. In this provocative and important book, Kate Braid tells the story of how she became a carpenter in the face of skepticism and discouragement.
In 1977 when Braid was broke and out of work, her male friends encouraged her to apply as a labo …
The World Is Moving around Me
On January 12, 2010, novelist Dany Laferriere had just ordered dinner at a Port-au-Prince restaurant with a friend when the earthquake struck. He survived; some 300,000 others did not. The quake caused widespread destruction and left over 1 million homeless; it also revealed flaws in the impoverished nation's infrastructure that will take a generat …
Ever-Changing Sky
As a schoolteacher in Redding, California, in the late 1940s, Doris Lee (née Pope) had a satisfying career, creature comforts, and a fashionable wardrobe. Then she fell in love with John Lee, a kind-hearted rancher who grew up on horseback and hunted for food.
Doris and John were married in 1949, and two years later migrated from the world they kn …
Words, Words, Words
Words, Words, Words is a wide-ranging collection of literary essays that astonish the reader with their candor, insight, and generosity. Many of them reveal the absurdity that so often underlies our most passionate thoughts, our most cherished moments, even our most disturbing fears and recognitions. They echo everywhere with a kind of cosmic laugh …
A Year at Killara Farm
Christine Allen and Michael Kluckner's portrayal of life on Killara Farm moves thoughtfully through a year of gardening with a rich, detailed narrative that evokes the many pleasures of life in rural Southwestern BC.
Allen, a master gardener, is also a lyrical writer, expressing the tiny details of life on the farm--the "winter jasmine, doggedly flo …
People of the Deer
"People of the Deer was...a wake-up call, the spark that struck the tinder that ignited the fire from which many subsequent generations of writers and activists have lit their torches, often ignorant of where that spark came from in the first place." -- Margaret Atwood
In 1886, the Ihalmiut of northern Canada numbered 7,000 souls; by 1946, when 25-y …
Sea of Slaughter
The northeastern seaboard of Canada and the United States, extending from Labrador to Cape Cod, was the first region of North America to suffer from human exploitation. Farley Mowat informs extensive historical and biological research with his direct experience living in and observing this region. When it was first published more than 20 years ago, …
Writing Screenplays
Find your voice -- write your unique story that sells!
Everyone has a story. Whether it is a drama, thriller, comedy, or horror, writing a screenplay is about finding your voice as a writer and writing your own unique story that will come alive through plays or movies.
This book will show you the fundamentals that are essential to writing a compellin …
Beyond the Home Ranch
Diana Phillips, daughter of Canadian folk legend Pan Phillips, shares more extraordinary tales about her life on the ranch in the remote British Columbian backcountry.
Two years after publishing Beyond the Chilcotin, her remarkable memoir about growing up on her famous father's pioneer ranch in the Chilcotin, Diana Phillips continues her story. Dis …
Afflictions & Departures
Winner, City of Victoria Butler Book Prize
Finalist, Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction
Nominated for the BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction
Afflictions & Departures is a collection of first-person experiential essays. However, this is not the realm of traditional memoir—in addition to incidents and feelings recaptured from memory …
A Geography of Blood
•Finalist, Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Non-Fiction
When Candace Savage and her partner buy a house in the romantic little town of Eastend, she has no idea what awaits her. At first she enjoys exploring the area around their new home, including the boyhood haunts of the celebrated American writer Wallace Stegner, the back roads of the …
The Fisher Queen
It’s 1981, and Sylvia Taylor has signed on as rookie deckhand on a wallowy 40-foot salmon troller. Looking forward to making money for university, she is determined to master the ins and outs of fishing some of the most dangerous waters in the world: the Graveyard of the Pacific. For four months, she helps navigate the waters off northern Vancouv …
Back to the Front
This print-on-demand title is available by request from most booksellers.
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The Western Front, the sinuous, deadly line of trenches that stretched from the English Channel to Switzerland during the First World War, also formed a scar on the imaginative landscape of our century.
On the eve of his thirtieth birthday, armed only with a backpack, a com …
Most of Me
With irreverent and at times mordant humor, Most of Me chronicles Robyn Michele Levy's early, mysterious symptoms (a dragging left foot, a crash into downward dead dog” position on the yoga mat), the devastating Parkinson’s diagnosis, her subsequent discovery of two lumps in her breast (Little Lump and Big Blob), her mastectomy and her life s …
Eating Dirt
Winner of the BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction
Winner of the 2012 Foreword Magazine Editor's Choice Prize Nonfiction
Shortlisted for the Hilary Weston Prize
Shortlisted for the Charles Taylor Non-Fiction Award
"Charlotte Gill writes with a dexterity and nobility that soars. This is the best book, on several fronts, that I've re …
A Wilder West
A controversial sport, rodeo is often seen as emblematic of the West's reputation as a “white man's country.” A Wilder West complicates this view, showing how rodeo has been an important contact zone -- a chaotic and unpredictable place of encounter that challenged expected social hierarchies. Rodeo has brought people together across racial and …
Packtrains & Airplanes
A true pioneer remembers the harsh but rich homesteading life in remote Lonesome Lake, BC. Born in a remote homestead at Lonesome Lake in southwest British Columbia, Trudy Turner was raised in true pioneer fashion, without running water, electricity or cars. (Trudy learned to fly a plane in her twenties, but didn't get her motor vehicle driver's li …
Blue Box
Six years after fleeing the 1973 military coup that overthrew Salvador Allende, the democratically elected, socialist leader of Chile, eleven-year-old Carmen Aguirre and her family return to South America to join the underground resistance. At eighteen, Carmen commits herself to the movement, running a safe house on the border between Chile and Ar …
My Year of the Racehorse
Kevin Chong has grand plans. He draws up a to-do list of major milestones that will give him the life he always wantedand the life that will inspire awe and envy in his friends. Things like settling down and starting a family; learning a foreign language; getting a tattoo. But these grand plans go out the window when Chong makes an unconventional …
Lorne Greenaway
A proud son of Bella Coola's Norwegian settlers, Lorne Greenaway grew up in the Okanagan in a time when kids left home after breakfast to face the day's adventures (and misadventures) armed with only an uncomplicated faith in their own youthful immortality. When Lorne won a pony in the Red River Cereal contest, a lifelong love of animals was born. …
Atlin's Anguish
On September 27, 1986, pilot Theresa Bond and five passengers took off on a routine flight from Atlin, BC, in her beloved de Havilland Beaver. The Taku Air passenger list that day included local politician Al Passarell, his wife, and three of Atlin's most prominent citizens -- including larger-than-life Atlin Inn owner Joe Florence. After an uneven …
And No Birds Sang
Feisty icon; passionate Canadian; unrelenting foe of all pretension; energetic provocateur-at-large and most importantly, superb and dedicated writer, there cannot be a Canadian alive who is unaware of the legacy that is Farley Mowat. And No Bird Sang and A Whale for the Killing are the first books in a new Douglas & McIntyre library of handsomely …
They Called Me Number One
BC Book Prize, Non-Fiction, Bev Sellars, They Called Me Number One (Finalist)
Burt Award for First Nations, Métis, and Inuit Literature: Bev Sellars, They Called Me Number One (Third Prize winner)
Like thousands of Aboriginal children in Canada, and elsewhere in the colonized world, Xatsu'll chief Bev Sellars spent part of her childhood as a studen …
The Bear's Embrace
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A national bestseller hailed as ""a testimony of courage."" -- Maclean's
On a sunny fall day in 1983, Patricia Van Tighem and her husband, Trevor Janz, were brutally attacked by a bear while hiking in the Canadian Rockies. Janz was severely hurt, but Van Tighem suffered even more serious, disfiguring injuries, and that she survived was a miracle.
A …
A Whale for the Killing
Feisty icon; passionate Canadian; unrelenting foe of all pretension; energetic provocateur-at-large and most importantly, superb and dedicated writer, there cannot be a Canadian alive who is unaware of the legacy that is Farley Mowat. And No Bird Sang and A Whale for the Killing are the first books in a new Douglas & McIntyre library of handsomely …
Furrows in the Sky
Gerry Andrews (1903–2005) had many adventures in his 102 years. He was a rural school teacher, a forester, a soldier and a surveyor. His developments in aerial photography dramatically changed forestry in BC in the late 1930s and assisted the Allies in the D-Day landings. As BC's surveyor-general from 1951 to 1968, he supervised the mapping of th …
Tower of Babble, The
"So, while a tell-all -- the circumstances and atmosphere surrounding his end at CBC loom mysteriously over the book until the final chapter -- Stursberg doesn't come off vindictive. With his memoir, he's still trying to help save the CBC." -- Telegraph Journal
"Richard Stursberg's rage dominates his crackling autobiography -- as does his grief for …
The Tower of Babble
A Globe and Mail top 100 book of 2012
The ultimate CBC insider exposes the controversies, successes and dead ends of his time at the top.
In 2004, CBC television had sunk to its lowest audience share in its history. That same year, Richard Stursberg, an avowed popularizer with a reputation for radical action, was hired to run English services. With …