Question: How much in love with a sport does a boy have to be when, at age 14, he asks his parents for permission to leave home and move to England on his own so he can join Reading FC to try to become a soccer professional—and warns that if they say no he will never forgive them? Answer: As much in love as the scared-stiff Bobby Lenarduzzi was w …

This volume represents the accumulated richness of fifty years' work by one of Canada's most important poets, Patrick Lane. Here, the reader can see how he developed from an engaged recorder of hard experience—even traumatic violence—into a master poet whose meditations on nature, human frailty, and love allow him to balance the world's sufferi …

The Yukon is a mythic place: the land is vast and wild, the climate harsh and uncompromising, the people resourceful and resilient. Say the word "Yukon" and southerners still conjure up images of the rough and ready frontier: whiskered men in plaid shirts or parka-clad women wielding axes in the struggle for survival in a silent, isolated land. The …

The poems in crawlspace, John Pass's first volume of poetry since he won the Governor General's Literary Award in 2006, work within the narrowing passages imposed upon us by the inevitable strictures and limitations of living and experience: aging, love and loss, tightening or unraveling family ties. Close to home as always, in one instance literal …

One of Chris Czajkowski's first priorities when she arrived at Nuk Tessli, a remote location in BC's Coast Mountains, was to devise a way to bake bread. At first, she lived in a tent and her oven was a simple pile of rocks with a hole in the middle. But as she built her wilderness cabins and started providing for the clients of her wilderness adven …

Patrick Lane is one of Canada's pre-eminent poets, winner of numerous awards, including the Governor General's Award for Poetry, the Canadian Authors Association Award, the Lieutenant Governor's Award for Literary Excellence and three National Magazine Awards. His distinguished career spans forty-five years and twenty-four volumes of poetry as well …

"Bring me moose meat! You will not be sorry!" So says Whitehorse author and cook Michele Genest to the hunters in her circle. Wild is wonderful when it comes to Genest's creative treatments for northern viands, with exciting ideas such as moose cooked in Yukon-brewed espresso stout and finished with chocolate, lime and cilantro, Arctic char marinat …

The mystical shores of coastal British Columbia hold boundless inspiration and an enigmatic spiritual presence for many who live along its various coves and inlets. For almost three decades, Carol Evans has been practicing and refining her art,creating stunning portrayals of the beautiful and rugged shores of Vancouver Island and the coastal mainla …

Conspiracies to overthrow the Yukon; terrorism in the Klondike;a bigamist Klondike Casanova; gunfights and how the Mounties got their man; Robert Service's secret love life; the Canadian who fooled Alaskans into making him governor; floods, famine and things found frozen from the past. The Yukon has them all--and more!

History Hunting in the Yukon r …

This is a book with a mission. On one level it is a celebration of the great Canadian poet Al Purdy by eminent writers who were his contemporaries. It is also part of a campaign to preserve the place that was the centre of Purdy's writing universe--his home, a lakeside A-frame cottage in Ameliasburgh, Ontario, where he and his wife Eurithe lived f …

Selected for Poetry in Transit 2009

The Fly in Autumn is a nuanced work with an absurdist twist in which recognizable landscapes--of North Vancouver quays and piers and harbour fog--are sometimes irrevocably altered by "water-light" into places of the mind alive with "the hundred thousand thoughts everyone collects in a day." Risking unease, using l …

Spirit of the Nikkei Fleet is an intimate collection of stories of Japanese Canadians on the water, from the first Japanese immigrant's arrival in 1877 to the present day. The 130-year history of the Nikkei is full of drama, violence, epic struggles against injustice, failures and triumphs. Leaving Japan to escape a life of poverty, they arrived in …

Winner of the John Lyman Book Award for best Canadian naval and maritime history
Finalist for the Nereus Writers' Trust Non-fiction Award
Finalist for the Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize, BC Book Prize
Longlisted for the 2007 Victoria Butler Book Prize
Honourable Mention for the Canadian Nautical Research Society's Keith Matthews Award

Fortune's …

Winner of the 2009 One Book, One Vancouver: The Host City Reads

"Janet Love Morrison has written about an important part of our sporting history . . . For a younger generation, this is like discovering the people who laid the first tracks in fresh powder--the boys of winter who inspired so many who followed."
--Peter Mansbridge, foreword

No one in E …

Praise for the Cross-Canada Crosswords series:

"Cross-Canada Crosswords is...appealing not only for its Canadian content but also for its witty humour and challenging clues. This book is highly recommended... for the crossword enthusiast."
—Resource Links, October 2005

"They are clever, funny and Canadian in spelling and content"
—K. Joan Hebden, …

"Put aside the fact that it ended my playing career, punched holes in my memory and put life as I knew it on indefinite hold, it wasn't that tough a hit."

Thus begins Goin' Deep, Matt Dunigan's gritty, often startling memoir of his 14-year journey as a Canadian Football League quarterback, a career brought to a shattering halt on an afternoon in Ham …

Shortlisted for the 2008 Acorn-Plantos Award for People's Poetry
Longlisted for the 2007 Victoria Butler Book Prize

Last Water Song, the first collection of new poetry from award-winning poet Patrick Lane since Go Leaving Strange (Harbour, 2004), is divided into two parts. The first part is a series of 16 long elegies on writer acquaintances who hav …

Longlisted for the 2008 ReLit Award for Poetry

High Speed Through Shoaling Water incorporates the beauty of the rural landscape with the strangeness of living in today's world. These deceptively simple poems cover rural life, social issues, love's vicissitudes, aging and the writing life. Throughout the book,
Wayman interweaves reflections on the la …

Longlisted for the 2008 ReLit Award for Poetry

Earth's Crude Gravities is both a meditation and an argument, a compelling series of poems on the world of matter and the world of spirit. Acclaimed poet Patrick Friesen muses on the religion that has been such a key part of his own background--but he also raises uncertainties.

Whether he is discussing h …

Praise for the Cross-Canada Crosswords series:

“Cross-Canada Crosswords is...appealing not only for its Canadian content but also for its witty humour and challenging clues. This book is highly recommended... for the crossword enthusiast."
—Resource Links, October 2005

"They are clever, funny and Canadian in spelling and content"
—K. Joan Hebde …

"I'm no good at writing," says Rafe Mair, paraphrasing Robert Benchley, "but by the time I realized that, I was too famous to stop." He didn't begin writing until he was fifty, but since that time he has won the coveted Michener Canadian Media Award, the Hutchison Award for Lifetime Contribution to BC Journalism and has been inducted into the Broad …

Earle Birney (1904-1995), the father of modern Canadian poetry, was one of Canada's finest writers and the author of "David," arguably the most popular Canadian poem of all time. One Muddy Hand: Selected Poems features Birney's best work, spanning his entire writing career from 1926 to 1987.

Born in Calgary, Birney grew up in different parts of Alb …

The Human Shore is an accomplished collection of poems both grittily real and spiritual, the follow-up to Russell Thornton's critically acclaimed House Built of Rain. Whether describing a tidal wave, a train yard, or the ravaging effects of a wildfire, Thornton's work is arresting and masterful. The poet covers a wide variety of places and subjects …

This latest book from Chris Czajkowski's spectacular corner of the world is another engrossing account of life in her wilderness. She regales the reader with stories of shimmering mountain peaks, roaring snow-fed creeks, bears, eagles and monstrous storms; and tales of her dogs--Bucky (short for Buckethead), who chases everything; Max, who tussles …

The Yukon is famous for its Klondike gold rush, but it was the site of another major mineral discovery in 1918 that touched off its own stampede of sourdoughs and eventually produced more paydirt than the Klondike. This was the fabulously rich Keno Hill silver deposit, which made the Yukon one of the world's leading silver producers and backstopped …

In this masterful work by award-winning poet David Zieroth, a man opens his apartment door to find a younger version of himself. The boy becomes his guide on a profound journey from 21st-century urban Vancouver to the 1950s Canadian prairies and back again. Along the way, time slides magically back and forth between the speaker's contemporary exist …

Praise for the Cross-Canada Crosswords series:

"Cross-Canada Crosswords is...appealing not only for its Canadian content but also for its witty humour and challenging clues. This book is highly recommended... for the crossword enthusiast."
—Resource Links, October 2005

"They are clever, funny and Canadian in spelling and content"
—K. Joan Hebden, …

CBC Vancouver's radio show BC Almanac, not to be outdone by the parent corporation's nationwide search for the 100 Greatest Canadians of all time, called upon its listeners in 2004 to nominate the 100 Greatest British Columbians of all time. This cornucopia of West Coast characters collected and bound by BC Almanac's host Mark Forsythe and director …

Jim Coleman saw the Victoria Cougars win the Stanley Cup in 1925 and the Team Canada-Russia hockey showdown in 1972. He saw Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth slam homers in training camp and was there when Jack Dempsey KO'd Jack Sharkey. He interviewed a young man named Jackie Robinson who wistfully dreamed of the day when black men might play in baseball's …

Ecologue is the culmination of Ken Belford's lifelong quest to reconcile land and language, innovation/development and earth's geographical history, nature and humankind's place within it. He extends this deep contemplation to the relationship between poem and reader, deftly shaping his lines into a pure expression of where "ritual and mystery loit …

Here are some hints: They're all Canadian, and they're all found in Cross-Canada Crosswords, a collection of 26 engaging and whimsical brain-teasers with a distinct maple flavour from Calgary-based crossword designer Gwen Sjogren.

Most crosswords appearing in Canadian newspapers and puzzle books originate in the USA, and it shows in the spellings an …

But readers of Mountie in Mukluks will soon realize they are in the presence of one of the most un-cop-like cops who ever built an igloo. And by the time they have finished they will never be able to think quite the same way about the fabled Redcoats, or life in the far north.
During the 1930s, Bill White gave up trapping and joined the Royal Cana …

In this fascinating and funny collection of correspondence, Canada's greatest poet lets it all hang out in spirited private exchanges with Pierre Trudeau, Carol Shields, Earle Birney, Anna Porter, Charles Bukowski, Margaret Laurence, Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Gwendolyn MacEwan, Jack McClelland, Northrup Frye, William Golding, Darryl Sittle …

Like a well-delivered punch line, Black & White And Read All Over, the tenth book by award-winning writer Arthur Black, is guaranteed to make you laugh. The beloved radio personality and newspaper columnist tackles a range of subjects from Sasquatch hunters to nose jobs to the legalization of pot. Known for his delight in the bizarre and derision o …

This unforgettable story reveals how medical missionaries responded to crises, emergencies and sudden illnesses--including grizzly bear attacks and airplane crashes--without modern technology or urban hospitals. It portrays the small missions and infirmaries and tells how their staff handled life and death in the deep bush, on mountain ranges, in N …

"Finding the right words for this place that has become home." That's the challenge identified by the Yukon's pre-eminent poet in this accomplished new collection. In the opening essay, Friis-Baastad describes his arrival in the Yukon as a 23-year-old fresh from Toronto, and his search for contemporary ways to evoke a landscape already mythologize …

Go Leaving Strange - the latest collection from award-winning poet Patrick Lane - is filled with poems that explore the darker side of human consciousness and desire. A man kills his own six-year-old child in "Weeds." An addict strives to keep ahead of death in "Smack." But amid this bleak landscape of pity and regret, there is also redemption and …

Thirty-five years after the publication of his first book, Peter Trower has brought together his finest poems for the beautiful, thorough and definitive volume Haunted Hills and Hanging Valleys.

From whistle punk to smelter worker to faller to crane operator, Trower worked up and down the West Coast for 22 years collecting the stories and soaking in …

* What Ontario city hosted a Wild West show 11 years before Buffalo Bill Cody got his start?
* Where in Ontario does the world's longest street end?
* What Ontarian was the last man to win an Olympic gold medal in golf?
* What native of Cobourg won a Best Actress Oscar?

These and many more fascinating factoids about Canada's most populous province a …

The author of Black Tie and Tales and Black in the Saddle Again, both winners of the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, returns with a new collection guaranteed to tickle your funny bone and make you scratch your head at the absurdities of life in the early years of the new millennium. In slyly ironic, pointedly witty essays, Black takes aim at the …

A richly illustrated chronicle that captures more than a century of life on a landmark Fraser Valley farm. This fascinating account details farming methods of a bygone era and all the toil, triumph and tragedy behind the establishment of a championship dairy herd.

When Allen Casey Wells passed through the valley of the Chilliwack River en route to t …

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 …

Russell Thornton has the rare ability to be both keenly observant of the minute details of his environment and intensely introspective. His poetry is full of startling images that will stay with you long after turning the final page.

In House Built of Rain, Thornton takes his readers on a dizzying journey of human experience - from the yearning of a …

In The Whale People, young Atlin must one day succeed his father Nit-gass, a great whaling chief of the Hotsath people. The boy trains for his role with the mixture of yearning and apprehension experienced by every youth racing toward adulthood - except that in Atlin's case, his whole community is depending on his success.

With lean, sure-footed pro …

Who planted the first wheat in the Prairies?
* How do you say "polar bear" in Inuktitut?
* What's the real name of the Manitoba town Margaret Laurence immortalized as Manawaka?
* What actress from Medicine Hat made her name opposite a giant ape?
* Name the rock guitar wizard from Regina, and the jazz guitar ace from Hochfeld, Manitoba.
* What town …

In an era when streetcars wound their way down Vancouver's streets, a ferry linked the cash-strapped municipality of West Vancouver to the city, and the Vancouver School Board was pushing for racially segregated schools, Hok Yat Louie was teaching his eight-year-old son Tong how to write invoices at his grocery stand. Because of the political clima …

The Breath You Take From The Lord is a masterful volume that confirms Patrick Friesen's reputation as one of Canada's finest and most versatile poets. In language striking in its simplicity and strength, Friesen's work moves with the controlled intensity of a hawk circling in a vast prairie sky.

These are poems infused with a sense of reverie and i …

For almost thirty years, poet Tom Wayman has celebrated the language of everyday life and work. Praised for his wit, sensuality and conversational style, Wayman can weave the mundane with the mysterious and shed new light on both.

In his latest collection, My Father's Cup, Wayman examines the conflicting emotions that arise when a parent dies, when …

What was the three-letter last name of the Ladysmith native who is "the world's most recognizable Canadian?"

What is the four-letter name of the character Burnaby native Michael J. Fox played on Family Ties?

What's the four-letter word for the amount of clothing required at Wreck Beach?

What's the nine-letter pass near Sparwood where the CPR started c …

Before the birth of Trans Canada Airlines (TCA) in 1937, Canada was one of the very few countries of the world that had no organized air service connecting its principal cities. In 1936, many of the one million people who travelled on scheduled flights in the United States were Canadian citizens who needed to travel south of the border to reach des …