More inspiring stories in this revised and updated edition of the bestselling Good News for a Change.

David Suzuki and Holly Dressel update their bestseller Good News for a Change, published in 2003 with over 35,000 copies sold, with the latest inspiring stories about individuals, groups, and businesses that are making real change in the world. The …

Captain Ed Shields tells the comprehensive history of the North Pacific codfish industry, shedding light on the lives of the men who sailed to the Bering Sea in search of cod from the 1860s until 1950. He describes the work that went into preparing the fishing fleet for five months on the high seas and ensuring that the ships came back safely with …

"Merv Wilkinson and Wildwood, his small patch of forest, provide powerful evidence that a forest can be logged while its integrity is maintained in perpetuity. In speaking out against current industrial clear-cut logging practices, Merv has become a genuine Canadian hero. Uncompromising, tough, fearless and with a wonderful sense of humour, he is …

There may be no other sailing ship in North America that has touched the lives of so many people during 80-plus years of existence as HMCS Oriole. The design of famed MIT marine architect George Owen, the pride of original owner George Gooderham, commodore of the Royal Canadian Yacht Club, the steadfast training ship of the Royal Canadian Navy for …

Finalist, Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize (BC Book Prizes)

Finalist, City of Vancouver Book Prize

Long listed for CBC Canada Reads 2015

The Door Is Open is a compassionate, reflective, and informative memoir about three-and-a-half years spent volunteering at a skid row drop-in centre in Vancouver’s downtown eastside. In an area most renowned for its …

This fourth collection of short stories written by Robert James (Jim) Challenger combines the timeless appeal of Aesop's fables with the oral storytelling traditions of First Nations and other cultures. Each story stimulates conversation about the moral woven within.

Go along on Salmon's journey. Learn how Hermit Crab found a new home. Discover why …

The Inanimate World is an affecting suite of stories, with a novella-length piece at its core. The stories within The Inanimate World traverse both rural and urban landscapes, exploring the terrain of the personal as much as the geographic. They span the time period of 1980 to the present, providing relevant insights into the private lives of peopl …

Stone Rain is a triptych that investigates what it means to see. In particular, the set of three lyrical sequences asks how the artist-observer, the urban witness, and the foreign traveler all shape the world as the site of story.

In Storyboards, a Northwest Coast Mask Exhibit serves as inspiration for lyric poems in which the poet imaginatively re …

Lucy sets off on an adventure to find her father who has been captured by pirates. Lucy and the Pirates is a rollicking, rambunctious adventure story set in the days when pirates sailed the seas and no traveller was safe. Glen Petrie's text and Matilda Harrison's richly-detailed illustrations combine to create a period piece of great authenticity a …

The largest of BC's southern Gulf Islands, beautiful Salt Spring Island has long been a favoured holiday destination and a prized real-estate area for those in search of an idyllic rural residence. Now available in trade paper, Salt Spring: The Story of an Island chronicles the island's rich history from the days when Coast Salish people inhabited …

Browsing in his grandfather's study, young Jamie discovers a notebook entitled "This Was My War" and finds himself pulled into the life of East End London teenagers whose adolescent years were overtaken by the devastation of World War II. As Jamie follows his grandfather's story in which "war" changes from silver screen exploits to bombs exploding …

Ronsdale Press offers a new edition of Steveston, this much loved work by two of Canada's finest poets and photographers. For this edition, Daphne Marlatt has written a new poem, never before published, to offer a postscript from 2001 on the original 1974 undertaking. At the publisher's request, Robert Minden has returned to his photographic archiv …

Throughout her life, Mildred Osterhout Fahrni walked with J.S. Woodsworth, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. She heard Ghandi tell the British of his dream of a free India in 1931. When the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation was born in Regina in 1933, Fahrni was there. As a reporter she covered the founding of the United Nations in San Fran …

About 10 years ago, George Bowering and Linda Hutcheon came up with the idea for a short fiction collection called Likely Stories: A Postmodern Sampler. It was a great idea at a time when a lot of people were still trying to figure out what “postmodern” actually meant.
That fine collection of stories has now gone out of print, and George Bower …

Connie Fife is one of Canada’s warrior poets. Poems for a New World, her third book of poems, refuses to take prisoners. She writes of Oka and Gustafson Lake, of the police shooting of a Native mother and child, as well as the NATO genocide in Yugoslavia. Reflecting on her own life, she carves out a space for new forms of loving that will act as …

Angela Wanhalla begins her story in Maitapapa, Taieri, New Zealand, the mixed-descent community where her great-grandparents, John Brown and Mabel Smith, were born. As her book took shape, a community emerged from the records, re-casting history and identity in the present. Drawing on the experiences of mixed-Maori/White families, Wanhalla examines …

Women played a vital role in the shaping of the West in Canada between the 1880s and 1940s. Yet surprisingly little is known about their contributions or the differences sex and gender made to the opportunities and obstacles women encountered. Telling Tales contributes to the rewriting of western Canada’s past by integrating women into the shifti …

When Ian's parents separate, he moves with his mother to the city, a thousand miles away from the prairie wheat farm he calls home. With no friends and a bleak moonscape of a backyard to play in, Ian has only an old shoe box of objects from his past life to keep him company. But after he peeks through the fence to the lush garden next door, Ian is …

In this enchanting story set in the Middle East, a storyteller becomes old and weary and another would take his place. Aziz discovers that he is to become the next storyteller. All the stories of the world are woven into a magic carpet and lie waiting for him to tell.

An extravagant, tragicomic novel, Flesh Wounds & Purple Flowers takes us into the world of Latino machos and cha-cha divas of Santiago's gay underground, full of dreamers and schemers looking for salvation abroad. One of them is Camilo, a strong-willed queen who makes it out of Chile in the early eighties, but en route to New York lands in Vancouv …

When it comes to passing the puck and reacting to hockey's fast pace, Paul Kariya has only one peer--Wayne Gretzky. And, wherever this Anaheim Mighty Ducks' left-winger plays, he astonishes competitors and teammates alike with his talent. Using dramatic color photography and an exciting text just right for 8 to 10 year olds, here is the fascinating …

The work gathered in this anthology spans a wide range of formats and styles: essay, biography, story, prose and journalism. Pertinent pieces include "Albums That Saved My Life" by Richard Van Camp, "Iron Yells" by Gerry William and "Feast of Four Winds" by Beth Cuthand.

This profoundly honest Holocaust memoir describes the transformation of everyday anti-Semitism into the Holocaust nightmare. Central to the story are the years Mielnicki spent in the camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Buna, Mittelbau-Dora and Belsen. Mielnicki's account is a harrowing yet powerfully redeeming human drama. Includes over 30 black and white …

In this collection of nine short stories and the powerful novella "The Sacred Travellers," Marie-Claire Blais offers an exploration of the major themes of her work: the pain of desire, the fragility and vulnerability of the human spirit, the quest for purity and generosity, and the pitiless search for truth. The characters in this new collection ar …

The author shares not only her artistic rendition of the prominent natives she paints, but stories, legends and personal experiences of these historical figures of a vanishing nation. Mildred Valley Thornton had an abiding passion which she pursued with almost missionary fever throughout her life - the preservation of Plains Indian culture. For ove …

A century ago, the steel ships working coastal waters were built elsewhere. Gradually marine engineers began migrating to the coast with their families, and the BC industry got underway.

Ships of Steel chronicles that industry from the early development of steel construction facilities, equipment and qualified personnel; to the World War II boom whe …

This young adult historical novel, set in the early seventeenth century, tells the story of Madeleine Hebert and her brother Philippe who travel to New France to join their father after their mother dies in France. On arriving in Quebec city, they learn that their father, with the Regiment de Carignan, is at Michilimackinac, and possibly ill.

When P …

It's the 1950s, and just when Terry Belshaw -- the unlikely hero of Peter Trower's two previous novels, Grogan's Café and Dead Man's Ticket -- vows never to log again, his circumstances change and he needs to return to BC's backwoods to get a stake, and fast.

His newest adventures -- gripping and ominous -- are detailed in The Judas Hills, in which …

In The Chinese in Vancouver, Wing Chung Ng captures the fascinating story of the city's Chinese in their search for identity. He juxtaposes the cultural positions of different generations of Chinese immigrants and their Canadian-born descendants and unveils the ongoing struggle over the definition of being Chinese. It is an engrossing story about c …

In Islands of Truth, Daniel Clayton examines a series of encounters with the Native peoples and territory of Vancouver Island in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Although he focuses on a particular region and period, Clayton also meditates on how representations of land and people, and studies of the past, serve and shape specifi …

Close to Spider Man marks the debut of an exciting new literary talent: a collection of connected stories whose female narrators seek out lives for themselves amidst the lonely, breathtaking landscape of the Yukon. The young people in Ivan Coyote's deeply personal stories are looking to make a break from their circumstances, but the North is in the …

British Columbia is a province of extraordinary extremes: urban areas and rural territories; lush farm terrain and mountain vistas; balmy ocean views and frozen snowscapes. Its population is equally diverse: gardeners, skiiers, bush pilots, filmmakers, fishermen, and assorted eccentrics who could have only come from British Columbia. Through it al …

Sex, once the great unspoken, is now regularly commodified and prepackaged for wide consumer consumption, on TV, in films, on billboards. In this context in which nothing is shocking--no boundary too sacred to cross--what does sex mean, particularly to those born under these conditions? Carnal Nation collects stories about sex by an exciting new g …

The genre of horror has in the past been the exclusive province of heterosexual writers and themes, stereotypically involving a male antagonist and a female victim. Although the incursions into the field by such writers as Anne Rich and Poppy Z. Brite have largely blurred sexual orientation boundaries, there has never been an anthology of horror s …

Alarming - edgy, often disturbing, and superbly written - these short stories illuminate the dark, troubled heart of human existence.

A young girl escapes the bonds of her abusive adopted mother. A woman does not leave her rotting apartment for over a month. A widower passes through his wife's garden for the first time. A cosmetician slowly destroys …

The long-awaited sequel to BC children's classic Jason and the Sea Otter.

This delightful story of a Nuu-chah-nulth boy explores First Nations traditions and values through the making of a canoe. Jason's first canoe is crushed during a storm, and he must replace it. Through Uncle Silas, he learns the traditional methods of canoe building - plus scor …

In Volume II, Wasserman shows us Canadian drama from 1985 up to 1997, during which we see women playwrights rise to greater prominence, along with Native, gay and lesbian, and Quebecois playwrights. But, continuing on from Volume I, this selection of plays not only takes us farther into the annals of the lives of the marginalized; it also provides …

In the Fall of 1900, a young American anthropologist named John Swanton arrived in the Haida country, on the Northwest Coast of North America, intending to learn everything he could about Haida mythology. He spent the next ten months phonetically transcribing several thousand pages of myths, stories, histories and songs in the Haida language. Swant …

In this illuminating and theoretically sophisticated study of indigenous oral narratives, Julie Cruikshank moves beyond the text to explore the social power and significance of storytelling. Circumpolar Native peoples today experience strikingly different and often competing systems of narrative and knowledge. These systems include more traditional …

The author tells the story of the unusual and beautiful creatures that inhabit ancient rainforests of the northwest coast of British Columbia. White Spirit Bear tells the story of the unusual and beautiful creatures that inhabit ancient rainforests on the northwest coast of British Columbia. Seldom interacting with humans, these rare white black be …

Tales of how author transported provisions, built their cabin and spent their honeymoon year on the South Nahanni River. A tale of adventure, strength and nature's ever changing moods and faces. The South Nahanni River of Canada's Northwest Territories has captivated canoeists and mountain adventurers for decades. Imagine flying 4,000 pounds of sup …

The Frontier World of Edgar Dewdney is a biography of a man who played a key role in the events which marked the political, social, and economic transformation of western Canada in the latter half of the nineteenth century. An immigrant adventurer seeking his fortune in the colonies, Dewdney was embroiled in the gold rushes of the 1860s, the B.C. d …

In the mid-1800s, Victoria grew from a fur-trading post into a provincial capital—the jewel in British Columbia's golden crown. Meanwhile, many of the early residents, happy to leave the Hudson's Bay Company behind, followed simple trails from the fort or discovered new routes of their own. In her first book, Danda Humphreys introduced readers to …

John R. Jewitt's story of being captured and enslaved by Maquinna, the great chief of the Mowachaht people, is both an adventure tale of survival and an unusual perspective on the First Nations of the northwest coast of Vancouver Island.

On March 22, 1803, while anchored in Nootka Sound on the west coast of Vancouver Island, the Boston was attacke …

Verity Sweeny Purdy at the age of eleven was sent to England to live with an aunt and train as a classical dancer. This memoir tells of her experience crossing Canada by train, the Atlantic Ocean by ship, and her arrival in England. Her story continues as she tells about her Aunt Doffrie and her bohemian way of life. We learn about her schooling an …

The South Nahanni, one of North America's wildest and most spectacular rivers, rushes through this park in the southwest corner of the Northwest Territories. John Harris and his partner, climber extraordinaire Vivien Lougheed, mount an expedition to this glorious but dangerous region. Harris's conversational account builds momentum as the party fol …

In November 1997, the world media converged on Vancouver to cover the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit. The major news story that emerged, however, had little to do with the crisis unfolding in the Asian economies. At the UBC campus, where the APEC leaders’ meeting was held, a predictable student protest met with an unusually strong polic …

There is no longer any doubt that the earth is warming; the question remains, why? For historian Gale Christianson, the emergence of Global warming is one of the most compelling stories in the history of humankind, made all the richer for having been a slowly developing phenomenon.

In his brilliantly constructed book Greenhouse, Christianson blends …