Alberta Alibi
Sheila, Rusty and Katie are on the road again. Fresh from their adventures in Barkerville, the trio is now in southern Alberta. Sheila has been anxiously anticipating her reunion with her father and is worried about how they will get along. Her fears are confirmed when they arrive at the Triple W Ranch and he is not there to greet them. When the p …
Flower Power
Callie's mother has chained herself to the neighbor's tree and is living inside the treehouse. She refuses to come down until the neighbor, Mr. Wilson, agrees to leave the tree standing. Soon reporters arrive to interview Callie about her mother's protest. Callie doesnít want to talk to anyone. More chaos ensues when Callie's grandmother invites t …
George Most Wanted
George Most Wanted is the second of three books in the George series
At the end of The True Story of George, George, a small plastic man, went for a ride on a rocket and flew apart. Now, with Katie and Mackenzie’s help, all his parts must find each other. But his head has been frozen deep in a bag of blackberries. Will he ever be whole again?
The …
Treaty Promises, Indian Reality
The federal government promised to care for the Indians in perpetuity and in return, the nomadic Indians would sign treaties, settle on reserves, and learn to be farmers. Many Indians, including those led by Chief Cowessess, were forced out of their traditional territory by the government and driven by hunger to reserves where agents of Indian Affa …
Dead Man in Paradise
At nightfall on June 22, 1965, a soldier walked in from the outskirts of a small town in the Dominican Republic and reported that he had just shot and killed two policemen and an outspoken Canadian Catholic priest. It was the opening scene in a mystery that, forty years later, compels J.B. MacKinnon, a nephew of the murdered missionary, to investig …
Spoiled Rotten
Jessica loves her yearly backpacking trip with her father, but this year everything has changed. This year Jessica has to share her vacation with her new stepmother and her spoiled new stepsister, Amy. Jessica tries to salvage her holiday by sneaking off for a day hike alone, but Amy follows. Jessica is certain that Amy will ruin the day. Amy rises …
The Summer of the Spotted Owl
After a hang glider crashes into the pool of the house where Dinah and Madge are house-sitting, the hapless pilot creates more than a splash of suspicion in Dinah’s mind. Why does this itchy intruder make off with Dinah’s inflatable turtle? Why is someone trying to drive their cat-mad neighbor away? And what is the connection with the balding s …
Red Sea
Fourteen-year-old Libby didn't want to go on a year long sailing adventure with her mother and her stepfather, Duncan, and she isn't about to let them forget it. Traveling through the Red Sea, Libby causes them to be late and make a dangerous crossing alone. When modern-day pirates attack, Duncan is killed and Libby's mother is left seriously injur …
Dimples Delight
Lawrence hates being teased about his dimples, but nothing he does seems to make any difference. Joe goes right on teasing him, and the teasing gets meaner and meaner. Finally, Lawrence notices something about his friend Stewart that may provide the tool he needs to tease-proof himself once and for all.
The Big Tree Gang
Reg and Keely are twins. Keely loves painting and bugs. Reg loves rocks. Keely sings crazy rhymes. Reg plays softball. Shawna and Burt are their friends. In this series of linked stories, the childrenís deep involvement with their daily activities never falters, from a bug walk, through incidents flying a kite and dividing labor at clean up time, …
Neil Young Nation
Neil Young will turn 60 in 2005. Kevin Chong will turn 30. To celebrate these two milestones, Chong sets off on a road trip in search of his boyhood hero. Crisscrossing the continent, he visits Winnipeg, where Young formed his first band; Toronto, where Young was a Yorkville folkie; Los Angeles, where he became a star with Buffalo Springfield; and …
Klondike Cattle Drive
The latest addition to TouchWood Editions’ Classics West Collection, Klondike Cattle Drive is the colourful tale of a formidable trek undertaken by legendary Cariboo rancher Norman Lee.
In 1898, Lee set out to drive 200 head of cattle from his home in the Chilcotin area of B.C. to the Klondike goldfields—a distance of 1,500 miles. He was gambli …
Love Block
Love Block is the winner of the 27th Annual 3-Day Novel Contest, the annual Labour Day weekend marathon in which entrants around the world spend 72 hours writing a novel from beginning to end. The contest, inspired by the story that Voltaire wrote his novel Candide in three days, has attracted thousands of contestants over the years, undaunted by t …
The Buffalo Head
The wildest, loveliest and least-travelled region of Alberta was R.M. Patterson’s home territory in the 1930s and ’40s. The Buffalo Head ranch was located in the foothills of the majestic Canadian Rockies. With the mountains as a backdrop, this dude ranch hosted visitors from around the world. Patterson bought it from its founder, a wild Italia …
Crimeways
In the same vein as Heartways and Futureways?the first two books in the Ways series?Crimeways is literature as conceptual art: a unique collaboration between the Whitney Museum of American Art, Printed Matter, Inc., and Arsenal. Crimeways is a faux mystery/crime "novel" in which each chapter is written by a different contributor, all of whom create …
Gamblers, Gunmen, and Good-time Gals
The promise of fast money and good times attracted some of America's most legendary personalities to the mines, gambling dens and bordellos of early Colorado. It was a world of famous gunslingers, slick con men, expert gamblers and high-class madams. This is a great collection of shoot-em-up, knock-em-down stories about how the west was wild.
Shaped by the West Wind
Along the east shore of Ontario’s Georgian Bay lie the Thirty Thousand Islands, a granite archipelago scarred by glaciers, where the white pines cling to the ancient rock, twisted and bent by the west wind -- a symbol of a region where human history has been shaped by the natural environment. Over the last four centuries, the Bay has been visited …
Imagining Difference
Imagining Difference is an ethnography about historical and contemporary ideas of human difference expressed by residents of Fernie, BC – a coal-mining town transforming into an international ski resort. Focusing on diverse experiences of people from the European diaspora, Robertson analyzes expressions of difference from the multiple locations o …
Flying Crooked
There are many books about the processes people go through when they discover they have cancer. What makes Flying Crooked different is the way in which Jan Michael accepts the disease and its consequences. She continues to enjoy life, refuses radiotherapy, and rejects the idea of even wearing a prosthesis after one of her breasts has been removed. …
McCarthy Tetrault
A comprehensive history of Canada's first national law firm: the people, the innovations and the unprecedented growth.
McCarthy Tetrault is the largest and one of the most eminent of Canadian law firms, with offices in all the major business centres in Canada as well as in New York and in London, England. It is also one of the oldest, with roots goi …
Home Before Dark
Erik and his friends spend all their time on the water, exploring the shoreline and islands off British Columbia's Sunshine Coast. While they all have experience with boats and the outdoors, the unpredictable weather and fickle seas often manage to test their courage and abilities. While exploring a burned-out homestead on a remote island, the teen …
I Married the Klondike
In 1907, Laura Beatrice Berton, a 29-year-old kindergarten teacher, left her comfortable life in Toronto Ontario to teach in a Yukon mining town. She fell in love with the North--and with a northerner--and made Dawson City her home for the next 25 years. I Married the Klondike is her classic and enduring memoir.
When she first arrived by steamboat …
Salmon Wars
Shortlisted for 2006 George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in B.C. Writing and Publishing
In this remarkable book, author Dennis Brown reviews the history of the West Coast salmon resource with such comprehensiveness and clarity that even those closest to the issue will find themselves viewing it with new understanding. Brown places the reader at t …
Song of the Loon
Published well ahead of its time, in 1966 by Greenleaf Classics, Song of the Loon is a lusty gay frontier romance that tells the story of Ephraim MacIver, a 19th-century outdoorsman, and his travels through the American wilderness, where he meets a number of characters who share with him stories, wisdom and homosexual encounters. The most popular …
Close Calls on High Walls
Experience life as a park warden in Canada's national parks with Close Calls on High Walls, a moving memoir from a former warden.
The mountains beckon from behind their mantle of clouds.... So pick up your pack and take the Alpenstock in hand. Who knows, in one of those quiet valleys we may even find those candle-flame blazes, where that old Guard …
Finding Home
Franz (Frank) Oberle was nine years old when his family was relocated from Germany to Poland. Once there, he was taken from his parents to an isolated school where adolescents were being indoctrinated into the Hitler Youth. As the tide of war changed, he became a refugee fleeing the Russian advance, arriving in Dresden as the city became the target …
Far Pastures
The stories in Far Pastures take readers to R.M. Patterson’s homestead in the Peace River country of northern Alberta. To all-night dances that ended as the northern lights faded in the dawn. To escapades on the Fort Nelson, Liard and South Nahanni rivers. And to a ranch in southern Alberta where he raised cattle during the lean years of the 1930 …
A Chosen Path
In A Chosen Path, Frank Oberle continues the amazing story of his remarkable rise from self-educated immigrant to national politician and Cabinet minister.
The bestselling first volume of Frank's autobiography, Finding Home, recounted his turbulent youth in Nazi-run Germany and his post-war immigration to Canada. After working for a year and a half …
The Buffalo People
Liz Bryan reconstructs the lives of some of the very first Canadians, who lived as nomadic buffalo hunters between the final days of the great Ice Age and the coming of the first Europeans. Bryan went beyond the part of their story that can be told through oral history, taking clues from decades of archaeological research.
In a writing style that …
The Romance Continues
Illustrated with lush reproductions of Grant and Nixie's art and photographs of their amazing garden, The Romance Continues is a love story, an art-appreciation adventure and a garden tour, all wrapped up in one gorgeous volume. Nationally known artists Grant Leier and Nixie Barton are also husband and wife, parents and the creators of an astonishi …
Guts and Go Overtime
Saskatchewan is hockey. The only activity more pervasive is farming, and often the two are combined when farmers play hockey for their community teams. As Calvin Daniels discovered when researching and writing the first Guts and Go (2004), hockey is so intertwined with everyday life in this province that hockey stories are much more than the retell …
Triumph and Tragedy in the Crowsnest Pass
Rich in stories, the Crowsnest Pass region in the southern Rocky Mountains still bears evidence of its tragedies, and one monumental triumph—a railroad rammed through the pass in 18 months. Hailed as the greatest project in the Dominion, the Crow's Nest Pass Railway was built by men who toiled with horses and primitive tools to carve the way for …
Fort de Prairies
Fort Edmonton, a prairie institution and icon from 1795 to 1915, was not just a physical edifice and community—it was a touchstone of western Canadian commercial history, leading to the founding of a strong prosperous city. Established in the wilderness as an outpost and pioneer commercial venture, it became the headquarters for the fur trade for …
Old Bones
Resting on what was left of the bench was something else, lighter in shade than the background, round, about the size of a cabbage. There were two large holes close together, a smaller pair below, then two rows of wedge-shaped objects. The pattern suddenly coalesced: in atavistic and chilling familiarity …
In a remote British Columbia lake, an an …
Grizzly's Home
In this latest collection of beautifully illustrated, easy-to-read fables, Robert James Challenger continues to teach children practical, moral lessons about life in today's complicated world. Owl shows Grandson that a problem will only go away when each person involved becomes part of the solution. Little Mallard Duck finds out the hard way that t …
The Young in One Another's Arms
UPDATE: Jane Rule has been inducted as a member into the Order of Canada, announced February 20, 2007. In January, Jane also received the Alice B. Toklas Medal (US) for her long and storied career as a lesbian novelist.
Jane Rule's 1977 novel The Young in One Another's Arms is set at the end of the Vietnam War in and around a boarding house in the …
My Life in a Kwagu'l Big House
Honey Jacobson considered herself lucky to live in the last semi-traditional big house of the Kwagu'ł people: a four-storey house filled with a loving extended family of cousins, uncles, aunts and the patriarch and matriarch of the household, Grandpa Moses and Granny Axu. While new smaller houses were spreading throughout her community, Honey real …
The Gathering Tree
The Gathering Tree is a beautifully illustrated children's book about HIV/AIDS. Written by award-winning First Nations author Larry Loyie and co-author Constance Brissenden, it is a gentle, positive story of a First Nations family facing HIV. After eleven-year-old Tyler and his younger sister Shay-Lyn learn their favorite cousin Robert has HIV, the …
Emily Carr and Her Dogs
Emily Carr tells the story of her joys and tribulations raising Old English Sheep Dogs in Victoria -- especially Flirt, Punk and Loo -- from her decision to start a kennel to the sad day when she had to close it. In the 25 vignettes that make up the book, she brings the affection, loyalty and nature of dogs to life. Her writing is appealingly direc …
Rosie's Dream Cape
Based on a true story, this charming juvenile novel tells of how eleven-year-old Rosie and her grandmother Bubba Sarah arrive in Toronto from Russia after fleeing one of the purges that carried away Rosie's mother, a famous Russian dancer. To help make ends meet, Rosie works in Yitzy's factory sewing velvet capes for Eatons, all the while dreaming …
Dreamspeaker
First a multiple award-winning film produced for television, then a novel and winner of the 1978 Gibson Literary Award, then a perennial bestseller, Dreamspeaker is the powerful and deeply moving story of a boy caught between two worlds, who learns too late the healing strength of faith and love. In a desperate attempt to escape the institution whe …