"What are memories?" writes Eric Nicol in this volume. "Laundered biography?" In this case, memoirs are the rollicking, funny life and times of Eric Nicol.

A young brother and sister in the village of Sliammon must go out after dark to fetch their grandmother, and even though they are good children, they are caught by The One Who Takes Bad Children. It is up to the brother and sister to free themselves and all the other children by doing what they have been taught: stay calm, pay attention, and use ev …

How I Joined Humanity at Last, David Zieroth's fifth book of poems, explores the mid-life road to renewal and tells the story of one man's journey toward compassion.

Zieroth's work delves deeply into the issues that affect all of us, from relationships between children and parents and "the old blood turbulence/ of families, tribes," to the day-to-d …

A decade ago, a nearly complete elasmosaur skeleton was found near Courtenay on Vancouver Island, in rocks dating from 80 million years ago, and it caused a sensation. Finds like this remind us that British Columbia is home to some of the richest marine fossil beds in the world, most of them on Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands which lie along …

Populations of Woodland Caribou and other large mammals are declining across Canada. Hundreds of "problem bears" are killed each year on government orders. Salmon stocks in BC are in danger of going the way of the East Coast cod. The quality and quantity of Canada's fresh water, one of our most precious resources, can no longer be taken for granted …

With unique insight and straightforward prose, Wingwalkers tells the saga of Canada's other airline, a scrappy western mongrel that, through eight decades and numerous name changes--Canadian Airways, Queen Charlotte Airlines, CP Air, PWA, Wardair and Canadian Airlines International--transformed itself from a bush flying and mining operation into an …

Flo Anderson and her husband Trevor worked as lightkeepers for 20 years, at Lennard Island and then at Barrett Rock, McInnis Island, Green Island and Race Rocks. In this extraordinary memoir Anderson speaks candidly about the challenges of learning to live on an exposed, isolated island where precipitous cliffs and gale-force winds were everday haz …

Where land meets sea, strange things happen, and most of them end up as stories. Like new driftlogs on a gravel beach, nine of the best are gathered here in issue number eighteen of the bestselling Raincoast Chronicles series. From a study of log barging on the BC coast to a controversial essay on who really shelled the Cape Estevan lighthouse in 1 …

Paddling the Sunshine Coast will introduce both new and experienced sea kayakers to the matchless paddling opportunities stretching from Howe Sound in the south to Desolation Sound in the north, and including Sechelt Inlet and Jervis Inlet. One of the most scenic areas in the world, the Sunshine Coast offers everything from surging saltwater catara …

These short stories, written from BC's north coast, unfold mostly at home, and mostly in the family. A woman writes to her sisters, remembering their weddings and her own; a little boy comes home from his paper route early, looking a bit pale; a mother takes her children to Prince George on the train, to stay with their musician dad in a seedy hote …

Mrs. Amor de Cosmos has been entertaining British Columbia's commercial fishermen for over 15 years with her popular "A Letter From Home" columns. In 1981, her letters became a feature of the national tabloid newspaper Canadian Fishing Report, and in 1992, her columns began appearing each month in British Columbia's leading commercial fishing magaz …

Shells and Shellfish of the Pacific Northwest is the indispensable guide for beachcombers, seashell collectors, divers or anyone who wants to know more about the shells and shellfish found along the saltwater beaches and intertidal areas of the Pacific Northwest. Everyone from weekend adventurers to serious collectors will love this book!

This comp …

Look around at the roads today, and you'll see a variety of sport-utility vehicles, trucks, jeeps, and any other rugged outdoor vehicle you van think of. It all points to the fact that four-wheeling is becoming one of the BC's fastest growing leisure activities. If people aren't actually out there on weekends in their four-wheel drive, they're sitt …

Correctly identifying young salmonids improves the accuracy of resource management information, leading to a fuller knowledge of the distribution and status of fish stocks. Until now, identifying coastal salmonids during their fry to smolt life stages in freshwater and saltwater estuaries of the Pacific Northwest has been difficult due to the lack …

At the dawn of the twentieth century, Vancouver was a mill town rapidly becoming a bustling cosmopolitan seaport. New technology proliferated, Klondike miners brawled their way through town, political turbulence and dramatic boom-and-bust cycles were the norm, Then as now, Vancouver was young, thriving, magnificently beautiful, and troubled by seri …

Since 1919, the Memorial Cup championship has provided excitement for all hockey fans and happy hunting grounds for National Hockey League scouts. It has shaped the way junior hockey is played in North America. Harbour Publishing is proud to present the very first book devoted to our national junior final and its heart-pounding history.

So come on i …

Patrick Lane, one of Canada's most distinguished and acclaimed poets, has published over twenty books of poetry in his long career. This collection, the only comprehensive book of his poetry since 1988, gathers together the work of two decades, presenting his best work as a mature poet.

British Columbia's Vancouver Island is the outdoor recreationist's dream, with magnificent waterfalls, secluded fishing spots and wilderness trails. Many of the best out of the way places are accessible only by way of the roughest logging or mining roads, which makes the Island a perfect place for four-wheeling as well.

This third instalment in Harb …

BC's favourite bush poet unwraps his second novel, a noirish mystery tour through unfamiliar and dangerous terrain.

Dead Man's Ticket is part logger's story, part thriller, and all page-turner: Terry Belshaw, the protagonist of Trower's acclaimed first novel Grogan's Cafe, makes his way through the seamy world of Vancouver's tenderloin district of t …

The extraordinary life story of Clayton Mack (1910-1993), a legendary hunting guide from the Nuxalk Nation (Bella Coola), is told in his own words. To Clayton Mack, who loved the wilderness and whose most precious memories were of the days when people got around without roads, told time without watches, and took planks from giant cedars without axe …

One morning it starts raining in Cassidy's house, and nobody can get it to stop. Like everyone else, Cassidy figures it's just a problem with the pipes. She doesn't know that she's about to embark on the ride of her life. She doesn't know that before the year is out, she will have wound up in hospital with every bruise and welt from her twenty-year …

Founder/Editor Howard White predicts that Raincoast Chronicles 17 will come to be known as the "bad medicine" issue. From the queasy feeling that pioneer medicine inspires in Margaret McKirdy's "The Doctor Book" to Robin Ward's profile of Francis Rattenbury - British Columbia's favourite architect - whose chequered career ended in a classic "Agatha …

Honest, offbeat, and very funny, Tom Henry's stories about living in the country have been broadcast weekly on CBC Radio in British Columbia and have become favourites among listeners in the city, the country, and everywhere in between. This cassette collects some of the best of Henry's anecdotes from Metchosin, a rural area on southern Vancouver I …

He's baaaaack! Get ready for another batch of smart, funny, bang-on stories of the ups and downs of country living.

Ever wondered how to discipline an unruly chicken? How to kill a mouse with a hardcover book? How to survive the pettifogging bureaucrats at your daughter's school? How to save your own butt when a tough guy outside the convenience sto …

Everybody's beading! It's easy, it's fun, it doesn't cost much, and in one evening you can make something gorgeous to wear or give, just by learning a few simple techniques.

Complete Beading for Beginners shows you how to make your own pins, rings, necklaces, dream catchers, embroidered clothes - even your own beads. Just choose a project, check out …

A selection of poems by the man described by the Globe & Mail as "the greatest of our poets." Rooms for Rent in the Outer Planets includes three decades' worth of thought-provoking work, including poems from the Governor-General's Award-winning The Cariboo Horses to Naked with Summer in Your Mouth.

Purdy personally made this selection, assisted by S …

A sea serpent silently appears on a sunny spring day; a shrieking "devil thing" wreaks havoc in a logging camp cookhouse; a wandering blind priest travels miles by boat, accompanied only by a young mute companion with an unearthly talent for throwing stones. These are the stories of a lost civilization. Its ruins peek out from alder thickets around …

During the years Al Purdy was becoming one of Canada's best-loved poets, he also wrote and published many pages of distinctive prose. This selection of almost forty years of essays and anecdotes is vintage Purdy. Part I, No Other Country, consists of essays on seeing the world as a Canadian. It begins as a fascinating travel diary as Purdy takes th …

When Gus takes up with Cindy, he takes up with her whole family - her brothers and sisters and their husbands and wives and live-ins and one nighters, all of whom come and go from the logging show, the beer parlour, the "crowbar hotel" and God knows where else. Then there's the kids. Weasel and Ferret, Phoebe, Donny, and all the rest of them who, l …

When Frank Turnbull came from Toronto to join the staff of the Vancouver General Hospital in 1933 as a brain surgeon, he automatically became Chief Neurosurgeon because he was the only one in the province. When he retired at 81 he was among BC's most distinguished physicians, in sharp contrast to his early years, when regular physicians considered …

Harvey Reginald MacMillan (1885-1976) is one of the most significant figures in Canadian corporate history. Born into extreme poverty in rural Ontario, MacMillan continued his education after high school and went on to study at Yale. Despite serious setbacks, including a bout with tuberculosis, MacMillan persevered, and in 1912 became the first chi …

"Paul Bunyan was in BC, that much we can prove. For evidence there is the Inside Passage, the Gulf Islands, Mount Baker and canned meat." So begins Paul Bunyan on the West Coast, a chronicle of Paul's last adventures, when he worked his way across the continent and finally reached the great conifer forests of the West Coast. It was here he faced hi …

Too Spare, Too Fierce, a new collection of love poems and elegies, is the twenty-second volume of poetry Patrick Lane - hailed as "the best poet of his generation" - has produced during his 30-year career as a writer.

More and more North Americans have been moving away from a meat-centred diet, for health, ideological, environmental and/or economic reasons. This latest book by Jeanne Marie Martin, an internationally known natural food writer, is a complete guide to the new lifestyle.

There are more than 120 recipes for mouth-watering and guilt-free appetizers, so …

The Wastell family had much to contend with on a daily basis. Besides running a sawmill and surviving in very un-genteel circumstances, Norris's mother, a registered nurse, was the only source of medical help in the community. Not surprisingly, she had to treat all types of ailments ranging from pneumonia to severed fingers and deliver numerous bab …

Raincoast Chronicles, Spilsbury's Coast, The Accidental Airline, A Hard Man to Beat, The Men There Were Then. . . and now another one to top off the list. Writing in the Rain features the same fascination with British Columbia and the same ability to bring its stories to life that have brought Howard White numerous awards and accolades, including t …

Here is the layperson's complete guide to the New Forest Economy, in which small- and medium-sized logging companies and mills thrive' in which we nurture our value-added industries instead of selling off our raw materials at too high a volume and too low a price, in which old forests are protected and new ones are planned and cultivated intelligen …

This light-hearted murder mystery features Jimmy Sung, an unsuccessful private investigator who was once a certified whiz kid but has since sunk into a dreamy existential malaise.

When schoolgirl Janet MacDougall hears that her playboy brother Martin has committed suicide, she doesn't believe it. Desperate to learn the truth, Janet hires Jimmy Sung, …

Radical Innocence is an "invitation to reverie," a collection of poems that is at once suffused with marvels and a brilliant historical and cultural critique of our society's development. In this ambivalent look at classical christian attitudes and how they have influenced the western world, Pass moves beyond the ordinary, taking images and persona …

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 …

Lonely in a Cool, Sweet Way is the latest collection of poems by a writer whom Al Purdy has compared to Emily Dickinson and Margaret Avison. "I have the sense of seeing things with her eyes and mind," Purdy said in his introduction to her first book, She Reminds Me of Vermeer, "of actually being in her situation, and it's this intimacy that gives h …

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 …

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 …

This collection of poems is steeped in the west coast tradition of storytelling and mythmaking, a tradition Howard White has nurtured for two decades. The poems are as real, down-to-earth and funny as White's award-winning prose.

He admits to having a messy yard, describes city street crazies and the late-night "undermind," teaches his boys how to h …

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 …

This second book by the Vancouver Sun columnist, author of the successful Robin Ward's Vancouver, offers 60 drawings of structures in Vancouver, Victoria, Seattle and points between. The Sun Yat Sen Gardens and Cathedral Place in downtown Vancouver, the Empress Hotel and Eaton Centre in Victoria, historic structures in Britannia Beach and Port Town …

Timmy's home is the Strait of Georgia, where he tows barges to BC's tiny logging communities, large port cities and everything in between, in all kinds of weather. Timmy, Captain Jones and the denizens of the west coast people - otters, whales, seagulls - introduce children to the life and work of the BC coast in fun, colourful style.