At the age of sixteen, Ernest Lamarque travelled from England to North America, to begin a life as a Victorian adventurer. Born in 1879 and orphaned at age twelve, he would go on to become an artist, a writer and a surveyor, creating some of the earliest visual records of the people of remote regions of Canada. At seventeen, Lamarque started workin …

The 1954 British Empire and Commonwealth Games in Vancouver changed both the city and world sport forever. The Games will always be remembered for the "Miracle Mile," the much-anticipated showdown between the first two men to break the four-minute barrier, England's Roger Bannister and Australia's John Landy. But as the press focused the world's at …

In 2007, at the age of sixty, Betsy Warland finds herself single and without a sense of family. On an impulse, she decides to travel to London to celebrate her birthday, where she experiences an odd compulsion to see an exhibit on the invention of military camouflage. Within the first five minutes of her visit, her lifelong feeling of being aberran …

Covering Rough Ground, Kate Braid’s first book, was published in 1991 and awarded the Pat Lowther Award for Best Book of Poetry by a Canadian Woman. Since then Kate has written extensively in prose, poetry and on CBC Radio about her and other women’s experiences in the construction trades. Her work has been highly praised by women in almost eve …

An elegy to and celebration of British Columbia's second-longest river, one at the centre of contemporary conversations about resource extraction and northern geographies, Skeena is an assemblage of voices, stories and histories both about the river and from the river's perspective. As a single poetic narrative spanning more than ninety pages, this …

He Leaves His Face in the Funeral Car is elegiac, lyrical, ironic; a series of reflections, recollections; a collection about relationships-to family, clocks, water, trees, ungulates, endings-recognizing that not all relationships are straightforward: a mother's secret false teeth, a teakettle riddled with bullet holes, pears and small knives. To l …

Ruth Bowers had a dream of becoming a professional violinist. In 1910, when traditional careers for women included nursing or teaching, Ruth joined the chautauqua and lyceum tour circuit and hit the road.
In the first part of the twentieth century, these popular tours brought music, education and entertainment to millions of people in rural North …

Sometimes tragic, sometimes uproariously funny, This Place a Stranger is a diverse collection of Canadian women writing about their experiences of travelling alone. From the deceptiveness of the everyday to the extremes of geography, weather and violence, these stories go beyond the usual tales of intrepid male explorers and reveal the varied and u …

Sometimes tragic, sometimes uproariously funny, THIS PLACE A STRANGER is a diverse collection of Canadian women writing about their experiences of travelling alone. From the deceptiveness of the everyday to the extremes of geography, weather and violence, these stories go beyond the usual tales of intrepid male explorers and reveal the varied and u …

Lasqueti Island has a rowdy and divided reputation. Between the 1970s and early 80s, the island attracted a flood of counter-culture seekers - communards, hippies, utopians, revolutionaries and other exotic characters looking for an alternative lifestyle. Today many perceive it as a romantic fantasy: an existence of bucolic peace, surrounded by iso …

In a mining town edging the Australian Nullarbor, Gina sits at the bar and devotes herself to the heart of what she’s trying to escape. After finishing a grueling cross-Canada tour, Dana, an alt-rock musician, flees to the Yukon to avoid her band’s rising fame and risks sabotaging it all. In a small West Coast fishing town, a boat-dwelling moth …

Why do some of us learn to bend? Others break? How do we move from shame to being "enough"? How do we bounce back stronger after adversity and then embrace our own humanity with its flawed beauty? In her first full collection of poetry, Jane Byers explores her personal experience with resilience, beginning with her own difficult birth, which she de …

Following tragic events from which Julie O'Dale believes she will never recover, she buys into her husband Ian's dream to give up their comfortable city lives and retreat to the isolated Chilcotin area of British Columbia. Only after purchasing the remote six hundred acre cattle ranch do they realize that, along with the and, they have inherited th …

In this playful yet poignant debut collection, Andrea Routley muddies the line between the physical and emotional worlds: reality becomes not simply what is in front of us, but a mutable, fragile place in the imagination.

On the verge of divorce, and in a pot-induced haze, Tom Douglas prepares to roast a pork shank in his new—and contentious—Aut …

Author Julie Fowler began a quest to find out more about an artist from the Cariboo named Sonia Cornwall (1919-2006). Through interviews, letters, original artworks, articles, exhibition catalogues, imaginings of conversations and occurrences, along with her own reflections on the experience, she pieced together a story of pioneering, love and the …

Betsy Trumpener’s raw fiction hits quickly, cuts deeply and lingers on in the imagination. Her urgent, unique voice pushes fiction north of what’s real. The Butcher of Penetang carves up rare slices of savory stories that are both tough and delicious. A child missing in a dangerous part of town; a draft dodger with bloody hands; a robber armed …

In the early 1980s, Yvonne Maximchuk, a single mother of two, was living in Whiterock, BC, and making a living as a working artist and art instructor. Then she fell in love with Albert, a crab fisherman who fished the waters of Boundary Bay. Drawn to his seemingly idyllic life and her desire for connection with the natural world, Yvonne and her chi …

The Earth Remembers Everything is a masterful blend of history, travel and fictional narrative, tracing the author’s journeys to some of the most difficult destinations in the world: the Cui Chi Tunnels in Vietnam, Hiroshima in Japan and Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland, First Nations sites such as Mosquito Lake on Moresby Island, Haida Gwaii and Chi …

The Light Through the Trees is a remarkable and deeply wise reflection on land, farming, a sense of place, connecting with nature and what it means to live on this earth. As a third-generation farmer, the author's roots go deep into the land but her work also captures her thoughts on such current issues as the environment, environmental identity, a …

Two unlikely worlds collide in Sheila Peters's first novel, The Taste of Ashes, a story of redemption and the resilience of the human spirit, even at its most frail and vulnerable.

Isabel Lee's early life in rural BC was forever changed by a brief but powerful love affair with a young Oblate priest. Now a recovering alcoholic, Isabel struggles to pu …

Imagine you're given the startling news that your body is only capable of having six more orgasms. "It's either buck up or fuck up," decides Mel in "Six Degrees of Altered Sensation," adding this new restraint to the perplexity of single life with progressive Multiple Sclerosis. In "Flickering," Francis becomes a pyromaniac in order to give her gro …

In this humourous and refreshing collection of short stories, David Thompson reveals the charm and grit of life in the Yukon. Talking at the Woodpile is a masterful blend of fact and fiction, history and the contemporary and intriguing stories that begin as long as 10,000 years ago. An unsuspecting miner discovers a frozen carcass while digging fo …

The junction of Highways 20 and 97 forms a rough right angle around which lies the city of Williams Lake. These are the coordinates by which Christian Petersen’s fiction can be charted. From the building of the Gaol at Soda Creek to ruminations on the origins of the Barkerville fire, All Those Drawn to Me explores the unpredictable, romantic and …

In Sarah Robert’s debut collection Wax Boats, a rural island community comes to life in action-packed, evocative tales. Cougar ladies fight the BC wilderness and the inevitable extinction of their peaceful island lives. An expectant mother turns to Native traditions to guide her through a safe delivery. A Boy Scout troupe rescues their own leader …

Ambulance lights flash as a baby is born on a busy city street, pine beetles paint forests a palette of new colours, a young boy faces a watery death under the ice of a frozen lake, and a mother stands in a bathtub at midnight wearing only her gumboots. In this anthology of new writing, women poets from Northern BC share their refreshing, intriguin …

There is an epidemic of violence against women in Canada and the world. For many women physical and sexual assault, or the threat of such violence, is a daily reality. Walk Myself Home is an anthology of poetry, fiction, nonfiction and oral interviews on the subject of violence against women including contributions by Kate Braid, Yasuko Thahn and S …

In the spring of 2007 the Canadian Forces and the Canadian Rangers, the regiment responsible for providing a military presence in isolated communities, set out on a treacherous journey across jagged sea ice and over steep and hostile terrain. Their mission was to travel over two thousand kilometres by snowmobile from Resolute to the Canadian Forces …

Enter the Chrysanthemum is a luminous collection of poems about family, love and loss. Employing precise imagery and concise language, Lam plumbs and mines ordinary events and experiences to find a central core of poetic insight and sometimes harrowing truth. Whether written from the vantage point of a young child observing her parents, a single pa …

Jack Boudreau, author of the bestselling Crazy Man's Creek and Grizzly Bear Mountain, is back with another wild and wooly, scarcely believable but nevertheless true tale of misadventure in British Columbia's northern wilderness. Wild and Free, which Boudreau says is his best book yet, tells the stories of two of Canada's most legendary mountain men …

Considered one of British Columbia's most famous pioneer surveyors, Frank Swannell surveyed much of northern BC for the provincial government between 1908 and 1914, taking many striking photographs of the area and its people. Together with his journal, these images constitute the best record of the region during this period of enormous transition. …

Set in the wild and wonderful Kootenay region of British Columbia, this novel probes the on-going battle between environmentalists and loggers over the forests both groups love -- but for very different reasons. Author Steve Anderson has evenly divided the debate, allowing his characters to fully present their perspectives and the reader to decide …

Beginning his medical practice in the wild frontier town of Williams Lake, the author reflects on his life, which takes him through northern Canada, Alabama, Africa and Central America.

With stunning photographs and the Elders' stories, author Wim Tewinkel records the lives lead by twenty-one elders of the Interior Salish people. They share with the author the highlights of their lives -- from being a bomber in World War II to being a great-grandmother and master bead worker. Tewinkel's photographic portraits capture both the dept …

In Crazy Man's Creek, author Jack Boudreau tells of the characters who have "caught the fever" in the rugged McGregor Mountain Range east of Prince George. Long recognized as some of the toughest bush in British Columbia, it was home to many who chose to lose themselves. Once there, life included confrontations with grizzly bears and raids by wolve …

These articles, stories and poems are selected from ten years' worth of work by the Prince Rupert Writers' Group. Some of the contributors have since moved away from Prince Rupert; others are as deeply rooted in the North Coast as lily pads in a creek bed; still others roam. The contributions to this anthology come from as far away as the Queen Cha …

In the manner of a good fireside chat with a favourite aunt or uncle, Life in the Cariboo chronicles the Lees' life in one of BC's most rugged areas. We hear about swamp ranches, education by mail, life before universal TV. Best of all, there are tales of some of the Cariboo's legendary - almost mythical - characters, such as Annie Basil and the ki …

Charlie [Lindbergh] was working on his plane when I arrived, writes Andrew Cruickshank as he awaits completion of his own duplicate of the Spirit of St. Louis. With this plane, Cruickshank starts the first airline in the Yukon. It was 1927, long before the legendary Grant McConachie's time. Andrew Cruickshank, a dashing and brave young RCMP officer …