Donna Jean ("Deejay") Banwin and Betty Fiddick - ordinary working women and the heroines of this novel by bestselling writer Anne Cameron - are living proof that the common woman is about as common as a thunderstorm.

When the story opens, DeeJay and Betty don't know each other. They're about the same age, and they're both growing up low-rent in smal …

This is the unusual story of a very unusual road: the 456-km Chilcotin Highway, which runs from Williams Lake to Bella Coola and is known as the 'loneliest road in BC." The highway took ninety years to build through some of the roughest terrain in Canada. Its history is served up here with plenty of photos and lots of anecdotes about the people who …

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 …

A need for place. A search for peace. a ceaseless quest, balanced by occasional respite -- physical,psychological or metaphysical. These are the preoccupations of our time, and they are fertile ground for the taut incisive prose of an accomplished writer. With Means of Escape, internationally acclaimed anthropologist, filmmaker and writer Hugh Brod …

Indian legends of the Northwest. These never-before-published legends were collected by pioneer merchant and attorney Judge Arthur E. Griffin, beginning in 1884. They have been passed down through five generations of the Griffin family, and have now been edited for publication by Trenholme J. Griffin. The great-grandson of the judge, Tren is steepe …

"Ron Shaw is the finest new fictioneer I have seen in a long time. Black Light is a superb collection; it displays Shaw's amazing ability to occupy black and white skins and cultures simultaneously." - J. Michael Yates

Seafaring stories in the Horatio Hornblower tradition, Midshipman Kirk, is filled with the rollicking adventures of Midshipman Eric Kirk and the iron screw corvette HMS Calcutta. The Calcutta patrols the Pacific coast in the 1880s and confronts Fenian plots, pirate raids, as well as the hazards of genteel social life in Victoria.

Magnificent and haunting, the tall cedar sculptures called totem poles have become a distinctive symbol of the native people of the Northwest Coast. The powerful carvings of the vital and extraordinary beings such as Sea Bear, Thunderbird and Cedar Man are impressive and intriguing.

In clear and lively prose, Hilary Stewart describes the various t …

Canada is a great maritime nation. Although ships and the sea have been part of its history for centuries, very little is known about the men and women who have worked in its coastal and lake fleets. Ships and Memories is a fascinating account of life at sea during the age of steam. In it, seafarers tell ther own stories and remember the good times …

“Always carry a bar of soap!” his father advises, as Allstair sets off to drive from Nairobi halfway across Africa in a secondhand Austin in the 1950s. “It wasn’t clear to me how you could fix a leak in the gas tank with soap,” Allstair reports, “but I never doubted that sort of instruction coming from him.” So begins the first tale i …

It is a hot June day. A woman sits in a bar in Montreal’s Main, waiting. Pushing down the disturbing scene (the police, a blanket) she saw that morning in the park. To focus herself, she tries to guess the stories of other women who come and go as the day darkens into night: the teenager Nanette; Adele of Halifax, who’s constantly on a train; a …

Available for the first time in one volume, Trees Are Lonely Company is a collection of Howard O’Hagan’s short stories previously published to critical acclaim in The Woman Who Got on at Jasper Station & Other Stories and Wilderness Men.

spanning decades of O’Hagan’s experience—as mountain guide, gentleman adventurer and storyteller—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 …

The story of the author's search for a hidden treasure of gold, and the legendary curse that surrounds it. Moments before he was hanged for murder, Slumach placed a curse on his gold mine. An estimated fifty-five people have disappeared trying to find his legendary mine. The lure of the lost mine has drawn Jack Mould to the mountains. He has lived …

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 …

Long known to insiders as one of the most unique personalities in Canadian letters, the celebrated poet Al Purdy begins this story of his life by noting that just as he was about to be born his hometown of Trenton was flattened by a historic explosion as the local munitions factory, "no doubt accounting for any oddity and eccentricity in my charact …

in 1984, when Sharon Brown's mother Betty became terminally ill with bone cancer, Sharon and her husband (writer Andreas Schroeder) brought Betty home to live her last weeks with them and their two young daughters. With the help of her family, trusted professionals and close-knit community of friends, Brown helped her mother die with dignity, surro …

"Late at night and wakeful, I don't count sheep as some do. I have another approach. I fish a reach of my river, a Vancouver Island stream born in mountain country that drops by way of riffles and pools and freshet-carved bars to a Strait of Georgia forty miles away."

So begins this gentle, humorous, engaging memoir: a heartfelt appreciation of Brit …

Weeng, the spirit of sleep. How Odjibaa won the Red Swan. Waupee and the daughters of the star. The whispering grass. Full of mystery, a sense of awe at the surrounding world and the courage of great warriors, the mythology of Canada's Indians forms an incredibly rich source of story and legend. Whether celebrating great journeys and feats of endur …

A mass murderer, a musician, a dominatrix, and a private eye gather around a game of Snakes and Ladders on New Year's Day. Lenore is waiting to murder, A.J. is waiting to die, Roxanne waits to usher in the end of the world. And all McGraw wants for Christmas is Doctor Tin. Some of them will die. Some of them have died before.
Enter, if you will, t …

Kathy Mezei tells a delightful story of Cuthbert (son of Nellie of Loch Ness), who swims via the Northwest Passage to Hornby Island, off the British Columbia coast, where, in the deep sea caverns, and much to the terror of the local Merpeople, he takes up residence. A tale filled with adventure and great tenderness, one that brings the adventures o …

Worlds in Small comprises the world's first collection of minimalist short stories, with a long preface and brief commentaries by the "master gatherer," John Robert Colombo. Each miniature is less than fifty words. Believe it or not, a few have no words at all. Through the magic of minimalism, we watch as something/everything comes of nothing.

All the characters in this new collection of short stories are "letting down their hair," allowing us to glimpse the extraordinary pains and passions that simmer beneath the surface of so-called ordinary men and women.

A Babylonian story as well the stories about UFOs. Semiramis is the wife of Nimrod, founder of Babylon, and queen in her own right, she has a significant part in this story and both she and Nimrod had ambitions. In fact, ambition is the name of the game for all of these Babylonians, modern and historic, though separated in time by more than 4,000 y …

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 …

Written in the tradition of Umberto Eco and Manuel Puig, The Pagan Wall is a first novel by a master storyteller. What appears on the surface as a murder mystery set in Alsatia and the Rhineland, involving international arms dealers, dangerous liaisons, and every other known mystery novel archetype, The Pagan Wall unfolds into layer upon layer of m …

A look into the life and times of falconry expert and acclaimed artist Frank L. Beebe. Hancock House is proud to present the fine and sensitive works of one of Canada's most famous bird artists, Frank Beebe. Here is the story of how young Frank took up drawing while in school, how one teacher reached his inner imagination and sparked his lifelong d …

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 …

This is a love story; an unlikely convergence of two people from different worlds who were able to make a rich and tender life together, and not only endure each other's company in alarmingly close quarters but revel in it.

Edith Iglauer was born in Cleveland and lived an urban, sophisticated life in New York until she met and married John Daly, a …

The Canada goose, a beloved cultural symbol for Canadians, is the inspiration for this story for children. It starts near the pulp mill at Powell River, BC, the unlikely spot where two mother Canada geese decide to lay their eggs. Some of the goslings are hatched in an incubator, then end up at a stump ranch where they decide that Crocus the Chines …

Homer Stevens spent half a century in the BC fishing industry, both as a working fisherman and as a leader of the United Fishermen and Allied Workers' Union. His story, an oral autobiography, was recorded and compiled by Rolf Knight.

Stevens grew up in Port Guichon, a poly-glot fishing community on the Fraser River delta. He was one of an extended …

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.

'Fragments from the Big Piece' is a non-linear, stylized play inspired by &quote;eastern bloc&quote; film noir. While exploring the dark underbelly of the drug trade, the play simultaneously tells the story of a man and a woman’s crumbling relationship.

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 …

A rich, emotional, sweeping drama of anger and sorrow spanning three generations. The family house in the country is the setting for the story of Victoire and her descendants through her husband and through her true love—who also happens to be her brother. It is Victoire’s anger at being forced away from the family home and her sorrow at being …

Mary Meigs is one of the eight women who portray themselves in the film The Company of Strangers, a “semi-documentary” National Film Board production, released in 1990 to overwhelming critical and popular acclaim. Meigs spent two years writing this extraordinary narrative, which begins as her story of being in the film and unfolds into a gentle …

Storytelling is a universal activity and may well be the oldest of the arts. It has always provided a vehicle for the expression of ideas, particularly in societies relying on oral tradition. Yet investigation of what contemporary storytellers actually communicate to their listeners occupies a restricted place in anthropology. The growing literatur …

When Jim Spilsbury, B.C's most famous pioneer entrepreneur, teams up with master storyteller and literary craftsman Howard White, the result is a spell-binding romp up and down British Columbia's rugged coast; eighty years of fascinating anecdotes and memories distilled into 190 pages.

Jim Spilsbury grew up in a tent on Savary Island, squatting on c …

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 …

Raven is clever and tricky - and greedy. In this story, she persuades her friends Gull, Cormorant, and Puffin to pick berries with her, and tricks them into doing more than their share of work, for less than their share of food. In the end, her friends find a clever way to teach Raven an important lesson.

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 …

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 …

Behind our everyday, apparently rational preoccupations lie the traces of a longing for sanctity and redemption. In these haunting, often chilling short stories, Beverley Daurio maps the sub-atomic space of contemporary alienation: a woman celebrates her divorce; a photographer trying to stay off drugs visits a monastery; an historian avoids facing …

The Athabasca Ryga presents essays, short stories, plays, and selections from a novel that George Ryga wrote in Athabasca and in Edmonton before his move to British Columbia in the early 1960s. Very little of this work has ever been published before. Almost all these early writings evoke and portray the sights, sounds and people of Deep Creek, Atha …