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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 "eastern bloc" 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.

Praise for Fragments from the Big Piece:

"A teasing game of metaphysical join-the-dots in a style that recalls K …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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.

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Spirit Quest was written from an Indian point of view, depicting the way events could have taken place, considering the facts as we know them and the culture as it was. Spirit Quest is the story of one boy's ordeal as he comes to grips with the natural forces and his inner turmoil during his lonely initiation rites. Trying to prove himself as he se …

The three largest ferry systems of North America, those of Washington, British Columbia and Alaska, stretch end-to-end in the Northwest. Their vessels carry millions of commuters every year, from city to island, from island to island, and from one water highway to the next. Along these inland corridors are hundreds of communities that depend upon f …

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 …

Responsibility is the theme of this modern detective story laced with comedy - but with the tragedy of white-Indian relations overshadowing every scene. Annie Charlie was a groundbreaking novel when it first appeared in 1973 and continues to spread to a new audience today.

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 …

Another issue of British Columbia's favorite anthology has arrived, and like its predecessors, Raincoast Chronicles 12 features the variety and style that has made the series a BC publishing phenomenon.

It includes stories from established favorites like Jim Spilsbury, Howard White and Edith Iglauer. It touches on subjects ranging from seineboats to …

"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 …

"Cameron doesn't stop at a wall of despair. Her stories illuminate her faith in compassion and tolerance."
-Vancouver Province

Life isn't easy in Bright's Crossing, the Vancouver Island town where these short stories are set. The locals make their living in the forests, the mines and the ocean; and it is rich strangers in far-off cities who get the …

A novel with many heroines. . .

Some are black, some white; some are babies and some grandmothers. What they have in common is Cassidy, a wealthy and merciless plantation owner in the pre-Civil War American South, for whom the black women are slaves and the white women are concubines.

Their story is the story of thousands of women of their time and p …

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 …

In this fast-paced, sophisticated and hilarious play, a man contemplating suicide on a seventh-storey building ledge confronts the stories of the people who live inside the building. These “seven stories” lead to a charming and surprising ending.
Cast of 2 women and 3 men.

The companion volume to Torque, Torpor is J. Michael Yates' second masterful collection of prose fiction. These compelling, often surreal works reveal a cryptic yet beautiful world in which nothing can be taken for granted.

Historian Peter Corley-Smith chronicles the provincial museum's accomplishments from 1886, when 30 prominent citizens petitioned the government to establish a provincial museum, to its centenary in 1986. From its modest roots, the museum has grown to become one of the most renowned in North America. But this is a story about the people with the vis …

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 …

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 …

While Mary Burns is a writer of exceptional talent in the “social-realism” school, Shinny’s Girls is a collection of stories which are more than just a “good read.” All of the stories in this collection are about mothers and daughters, written from a sensitive and perceptive “post-feminist” point of view, examining the lives of the fi …

The Happiest Man in the World looks under the carpet of post-modernism to search for competence and humour in a world of habitual assumptions about social, political, and sexual awareness. The characters, and the author, in these stories discover that their roles, and their role models are not as clear as they seem to be — husbands and wives, fat …

Anne Cameron writes with uncompromising candidness of the relationships between men and women. Her stories combine wit and gritty realism with a clear sense of the storyteller's art. Quite simply she is willing to venture into uncharted territory and speak of the things she finds there in a voice that is clear and at times unsettling.

In South of an …

An extraordinary new collection of short stories from the author of Dzelarhons and A Whole Brass Band.

Here is an assortment of relationships: lovers, husbands and wives, children and parents, friends; and of strong individuals: Nan, whose frog causes consternation and chaos; Daleth who defies a fundamentalist sect, only to discover that it's hard …

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 …

The captivating story of Mary John (who passed away in 2004), a pioneering Carrier Native whose life on the Stoney Creek reserve in central BC is a capsule history of First Nations life from a unique woman's perspective. A mother of twelve, Mary endured much tragedy and heartbreak--the pangs of racism, poverty, and the deaths of six children--but …

Vancouver's Granville Island complex rates the status of a genuine urban redevelopment wonder on several counts: it is an old industrial eyesore which has become one of Vancouver's most popular tourist attractions; it is a consciously planned "people place" that works; it is a government-run enterprise that makes money; it is a political creation w …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Spanning a period of nearly eighty years, the stories in this collection present the experience of living in Vancouver as filtered through the imagination of some of Canada's most famous writers. In tone, the stories range from the grimness of Dorothy Livesay's account of Depression misery, to the irony of Ethel Wilson's narrative of an evening gar …

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 …

Set in the desert on either side of the Mexico-U.S. border, this harrowing novel was inspired by an actual event: the abandonment to starvation and death of a “shipment” of Mexican immigrant workers. The sinister shadow of the vulture falls over every character in Ryga’s story—Ramon, the flesh-merchant; Juan, the bandito; Anastasio, the def …