Undaunted
For over a quarter century, many readers have agreed with legendary publisher Jack McClelland who said, "I have never before encountered a book journal as engaging as BC BookWorld." But over several decades, the populist style of BC BookWorld has tended to overshadow its literary value and its essentially educational agenda. Here in The Best of BC …
Left in British Columbia, The
This comprehensive history of the left in British Columbia from the late nineteenth century to the present explores the successes and failures of individuals and organizations striving to make a better world. Nineteenth-century coal miners and carpenters; Wobblies, Single Taxers, and communists; worker militancy in two world wars; the New Democrati …
Night for the Lady, A
A Night for the Lady explores the terrain of poetry conversation. Each poem arises from conversations with poets, colleagues and intimate friends. They range from a 1998 conversation on healing programs and the fundamentals of world change to a sequence of recent indigenous literary events on the prairies. Within the context of these conversations, …
He Moved A Mountain
Dr. Frank Arthur Calder of BC’s Nisga’a First Nation was the first indigenous person to be elected to any Canadian governing body. For twenty-six years he served as an MLA in the legislature of British Columbia. He was the driving force behind Canada’s decision to grant recognition of indigenous land title to First Nations people throughout t …
Late Moon
This stunning collection will break your heart and put it back together again, as Pamela Porter unravels a long-held family secret in a moving personal search for redemption, face to face with the question of her own identity. As she says, “It was this way when Rome was burning, / and was not so different / when dark fires flared / outside the wa …
Hannah & the Salish Sea
In the second volume of her Hannah trilogy, summer has arrived, and fourteen-year-old Hannah Anderson is excited about spending it with Max (who has been giving her stomach butterflies lately). But things are happening in Cowichan Bay that Hannah can’t explain. When a mysterious accident leads her to a nest of starving eaglets, she meets Izzy Tat …
Hannah and the Salish Sea
In the second volume of her Hannah trilogy, summer has arrived, and fourteen-year-old Hannah Anderson is excited about spending it with Max (who has been giving her stomach butterflies lately). But things are happening in Cowichan Bay that Hannah can't explain. When a mysterious accident leads her to a nest of starving eaglets, she meets Izzy Tate, …
Outlaw in India
In Outlaw in India, the fifth volume in the best-selling Submarine Outlaw series, Alfred and his crew of Seaweed the seagull and Hollie the dog begin their exploration of India with a piece of bad luck when they surface behind a frigate and bring the wrath of the Indian navy down upon them. After a near fatal encounter off Kochi, Alfred befriends a …
Flicker Tree, The
How do we learn to be where we live? How can a 21st-century mind, saturated with the culture and metaphors of contemporary life, connect to the natural world that surrounds us? In Nancy Holmes' new book of poetry, these questions are asked of her home, the Okanagan valley in the southern interior of British Columbia. In these poems, as Holmes comes …
Freedom Bound
In this, the final instalment of Jean Rae Baxter's best-selling young adult trilogy, eighteen-year-old Charlotte sails from Canada to Charleston in the beleaguered Thirteen Colonies to join her new husband Nick. During these final months of the American Revolution, she must muster all her wit and courage when she has to rescue Nick from being tortu …
Opening Act, The
The conventional opinion is that professional Canadian theatre began in 1953 with the founding of the Stratford Festival. But Susan McNicoll asks how this could be, when the majority of those taking the stage at Stratford were professional Canadian actors. To answer this question, McNicoll delves into the period to show how in fact the unbroken cha …
Charlie
The story of the 100,000 British children who came to Canada as child immigrants between 1870 and 1938 is not well known. Yet the descendants of these “Home Children” number over four million people in Canada today. The author is one of them. Charlie was her father. Charlie is a compelling account of an English boy who is sent to an orphanage f …
No Ordinary Place
Pamela Porter's poems celebrate a world awaiting discover. She opens this new collection with a poem entitles “An Offering” in which she brings to the ceremony “poems / for every season — of dreams born, / burning, broken” and, in particular, one that “begins like a perilous grace” to develop as “naked and tender and wanting.” Thr …
Ghosts of the Pacific
Ghosts of the Pacific, the fourth volume in the best-selling Submarine Outlaw series, begins with Alfred and his crew of Seaweed the seagull and Hollie the dog undertaking a harrowing journey through the icy gauntlet of the Northwest Passage on the way to the South Pacific. Alfred wants to see those dark places of the earth where horrendous events …
Runaway Dreams
Having developed an impressive reputation for his many novels and non-fiction works, Richard Wagamese now presents a collection of stunning poems ranging over a broad landscape. He begins with an immersion in the unforgettable world where "the ancient ones stand at your shoulder . . . making you a circle / containing everything."
These are Medicine …
I Just Ran
At the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics an unknown Vancouver runner named Percy Williams shocked the sports world by capturing the 100- and 200-metre gold medals. Some said the feat was a fluke. It wasn't. In 1929 Percy silenced naysayers by sweeping the US indoor track circuit, then he went on to set a world record in the 100 metres that would stand until …
Run Marco, Run
In this fast-paced novel for readers ten and up, James Graham, a Canadian journalist, is kidnapped in a market in Buenaventura, Colombia, right in front of Marco, his thirteen-year-old son. When the kidnappers try to grab Marco, his father yells at him, “Run Marco, run!” Marco manages to escape, and seeing no possibility of help in Colombia, he …
Spit Delaney's Island
Jack Hodgins‘ first book, published originally in 1976, is once again in print — in a new edition. Winner of the Eaton's Book Prize and nominated for the Governor General's Award, Spit Delaney's Island, a collection of short stories, put Vancouver Island on the map as a Canadian literary locale and set Hodgins off on his literary career. Hodgin …
Broken Trail
Broken Trail is the story a thirteen-year-old white boy, the son of United Empire Loyalists, who has been captured and adopted by the Oneida people. Striving to find his vision oki that will guide him in his quest to become a warrior, Broken Trail disavows his white heritage — he considers himself Oneida. But everything changes when Broken Trail, …
Beckett Soundings
In this collection of poems, Inge Israel works through Samuel Beckett's letters, his biographies and his actual plays and novels to probe the imagination that created his artistic works. Arguably the pre-eminent avant-garde and most influential writer of the 20th century and a legend in his own time, Beckett presents many glaring paradoxes.
Beckett …
Hannah & the Spindle Whorl
When twelve-year-old Hannah uncovers an ancient Salish spindle whorl hidden in a cave near her home in Cowichan Bay, she is transported back to a village called Tl'ulpalus, in a time before Europeans had settled in the area. Through the agency of a trickster raven, Hannah befriends Yisella, a young Salish girl, and is welcomed into village life. He …
Ghost of Heroes Past
Thirteen-year-old Johnny Anders is something of a misfit, with no friends and a poor school record, but all this begins to change when he is awakened one night to find a soldier-ghost in his bedroom. Johnny is taken back to meet a series of unusual heroes in Canada's war history. These include Joan Bamford Fletcher, who commandeered Japanese soldie …
Cathedral
This collection of poems takes us on a journey — a very personal journey of Pamela Porter's own — to Africa and South America, those corners of the world the news reports never seem to cover: to Angola's thirty-year-long civil war, a landscape overrun with poverty, AIDS, and infant mortality; and to the struggles of ordinary people still haunte …
Hannah and the Spindle Whorl
When twelve-year-old Hannah uncovers an ancient Salish spindle whorl hidden in a cave near her home in Cowichan Bay, she is transported back to a village called Tl'ulpalus, in a time before Europeans had settled in the area. Through the agency of a trickster raven, Hannah befriends Yisella, a young Salish girl, and is welcomed into village life. He …
Skin Like Mine
InSkin Like Mine Garry Gottfriedson offers a suite of poems that peel away the skin of contemporary first nations society to reveal an inside view of individual experience. Gottfriedson speaks of "minds full of anticipation" yet with "tongues pointing arrowheads." Today's youth, he says, are "afraid of themselves." He finds that both individuals an …
Survivor's Leave
It's 1944, and two young Canadian able seamen, Glen Cassley and Arthur "Ding Dong" Bell, find their ship sinking beneath them after a German submarine unleashes an acoustic torpedo. Miraculously, everyone on board survives, and Glen shouts out triumphantly:
"You know what this means, Ding? Survivor's Leave. We qualify for Survivor's Leave!"
With fun …
Women on Ice
Women on Ice is the first book to focus upon the vibrant world of women's ice hockey in western Canada during the First World War and through the 1920s. The Vancouver Amazons were one of the most important teams during this perod. Their championship laurels and their association with hockey's famous Patrick brothers distinguish the Amazons from oth …
Journey to Atlantis
In this sequel to the prize-winning young adult novel Submarine Outlaw, the sea of myth and legends beckons young Alfred once again, and the intrepid young explorer answers the call. With his loyal crew of a dog and a seagull by his side, Alfred sails across the Atlantic in his homemade submarine and enters the Mediterranean in search of the fabled …
From a Speaking Place
Which famous Canadian poet is a "gunman"? When did Bangalore move to Saskatchewan? Why is poetry a painting? a crime? What rare advice can you find in Romance novels? Who sings with the frogs? And what ever did happen to Pauline? Answering these and other questions, From a Speaking Place invites you into a conversation about what it means to be a r …
Tragic Links
Tragic Links is award-winning author Cathy Beveridge's fourth young adult novel focusing on Canadian historic disasters. This time Jolene and her family find themselves in Quebec where her father is conducting research for his Museum of Disasters. From the first, Jolene finds herself caught up in an old family feud and a new romantic friendship wit …
Dead Can't Dance, The
With a mother's touch, a lover's touch and the sure hand of an undertaker, Pam Calabrese MacLean compels the reader to take a dangerous look behind every façade, even though we will long to look away. Her women are fierce with their men, protective of their children and abrupt with the world. She observes the minutiae of life with an eye of apprec …
The Steppes Are the Colour of Sepia
The Steppes Are the Colour of Sepia: A Mennonite Memoir invites the reader to embark on a journey that traces the paths of ancestral memory over the steppes of the Russian empire to the valleys of Canada's Fraser River. Connie Braun's narrative continues where Sandra Birdsell's historical fiction Russlander has left off – back to the catastrophic …
Steppes Are the Colour of Sepia, The
The Steppes Are the Colour of Sepia: A Mennonite Memoir invites the reader to embark on a journey that traces the paths of ancestral memory over the steppes of the Russian empire to the valleys of Canada's Fraser River. Connie Braun's narrative continues where Sandra Birdsell's historical fiction Russlander has left off back to the catastrophic …
Borrowed Rooms
These poems, spare and nuanced, explore the borrowed rooms we inhabit in personal relationships: the temporary homes of marriage and parenting; the personas we carry for a little while and must ultimately abandon. In tight and unsentimental poems, Barbara Pelman grieves the death of a father, notes the changing dynamics of mothers and daughters, wa …
Cascadia
This book will appeal to anyone who wants to understand the unique culture and spirituality of the fast-growing Pacific Northwest, which includes British Columbia, Washington and Oregon. Envied by people around the world, Cascadia, as it is known, is remarkable for its famed mountains, evergreens, eagles, beaches and livable cities. Most people, ho …
Submarine Outlaw
Submarine Outlaw takes young adult readers on a unique journey when Alfred, a young boy who wants to be an explorer - not a fisherman, as his family demands - teams up with a junkyard genius to build a submarine that he sails around the Maritimes. The book takes the reader through the hands-on process of submarine construction into the world of rea …
