Philip Resnick's Footsteps of the Past constitutes a powerful set of reflections on the modern human condition. The book contains poems dealing with memory, recognition, and the slow passage of time, while others meditate on the deep wounds that chronic illness and disability can instill. Some of the poems have a critical political edge, while othe …

It's 1791. The year a new province is created in the country that will one day be called Canada. The year Hope Cobman's life turns around. At thirteen, she must leave the orphanage where she has lived since her mother's death one year ago. Alone in the world, she dreams of finding her father and three brothers - all complete strangers to her, for e …

Time touches everything, and in doing so changes everything. The Arrow of Time examines the challenges, transformations and surprises wrought by change, and celebrates the ways we attempt to measure our lives against this most invisible of concepts. From John Constable's home at East Bergholt to the shattered streets of Nanking, China, in 1937, Mey …

Still sassy, Doris Gregory takes the reader back over seventy years to the time when she broke with tradition, first by publicly challenging the University of British Columbia's discrimination against women, and then by joining the Canadian Women's Army Corps. Her memoir allows us to travel with her across the Atlantic at the height of the U-boat i …

This biography of Amor De Cosmos explores the life and career of this most eccentric of Canadian politicians, a man who played a crucial role in the creation of present-day Canada from sea to sea, and yet who, by the end of his life, was little remembered. Hawkins reveals how De Cosmos began public life as one of the most feared journalists in Brit …

In the seventh volume of the "Submarine Outlaw" series, Alfred takes his homemade submarine into the Southern Ocean to thwart the actions of the Japanese whalers. In Australia, he is mistakenly accused of sabotaging an oil tanker, forcing him to escape to Tasmania. There he meets up with Merwin Hughes, an eccentric environmentalist, and together th …

Goethe's poetry has delighted readers around the world for over two centuries, but for English readers there was clearly a need for a new contemporary translation. In an age which prizes both individual self-development and cultural diversity, one looks to Goethe (1749-1832) as the first writer to show how these two values could be combined. Goethe …

This novel begins when 13-year-old Kami, the daughter of a Japanese-Canadian mother and a Scottish-Canadian father, moves with her mother from Vancouver to Edmonton. Here she hopes to reunite with the father who appears to have abandoned her. While rummaging through family boxes, she finds an old diary written by her great-grandmother. While readin …

In this hauntingly beautiful novel with its palette of blues and greys, Danial Neil explores the world of Reuben Dale after the sudden death from a stroke of his beloved wife, June. Neil takes us inside suffering to show us the thoughts and feelings of the one left behind. Lost without the woman he has loved and leaned on, Reuben wanders aimlessly …

In this breathtaking collection of poems, Pamela Porter invokes the twin mysteries of love and loss to illumine the heart burdened by grief, yet comforted and renewed by the beauty of the natural world. In the long poem "Atonement," Porter takes us into a human drama, rich with astonishments: "There was no snow, but you could say the snow buried ev …

The year 2013 being the fiftieth anniversary of the Vancouver Poetry Conference at UBC, Wah uses the occasion to outline how a group of young poets at UBC (and this included George Bowering, Jamie Read, and himself among others) were discovering, through their publication of poetry in the newsletter TISH, that it was possible to write in new forms. …

These poems lead the reader into a world that reveals a balancing act between the familiar and known, the mysterious and wild. Some poems are narrative, some imagistic meditations, and some are small, playful pieces that edge into wisdom: "Here, here, you sing and now / Between me and what I see / lives eternity." Throughout there is a unifying voi …

In her fourth historical novel dealing with British North America and the American Revolution, Jean Rae Baxter focuses on Broken Trail, a young boy who was born white but captured and adopted by the Oneida people. The great Mohawk leader Thayendanegea - known to Euro-Canadians as Joseph Brant - has chosen Broken Trail to assist him in the daunting …

On the morning of June 13, 1886, a rogue wind fanned the flames of a small clearing fire-and within five hours, the newly incorporated city of Vancouver, British Columbia, had been reduced to smoldering ash. Vancouver is Ashes: The Great Fire of 1886 is the first detailed exploration of what happened on that pivotal, yet seldom revisited day in the …

Arrow through the Axes concludes the "Odyssey of a Slave" trilogy that began with the Red Maple–nominated Torn from Troy, retelling Homer's Odyssey. The slave Alexi, now free of his Greek captors, infiltrates the Greek strongholds of the Bronze Age in search of his sister. In so doing he participates in the stories of Orestes, son of Agamemnon, as …

Chaos Inside Thunderstorms draws the audience into the centre of the tumultuous political, socio/economical and historical reality of the First Nations experience in Canada today. It is poetic expression that examines leadership, resilience, honour, shame, and love. It examines the issues implicit in the Idle No More Movement and the Truth and Reco …

In Jack Hodgins' new novel, Cadillac Cathedral, he is at his humorous best in describing the eccentric but lovable characters in the little town of Portuguese Creek on Vancouver Island. Arvo is the main figure, a Finn who has worked in logging camps all his life and who now spends his retirement fixing old cars, often ones that he finds discarded i …

Mouse Tales, the first volume in the “Happy the Pocket Mouse” series, has been read to tens of thousands of students in Atlantic Canada and Ontario over the past five years, and has gathered a substantial following anxious to have the illustrated book in hand. Here, now, thanks to the artistic vision of Andrea Torrey Balsara, fans everywhere wi …

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 …

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 …

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, …

InSeas of South Africa, the sixth volume in the best-selling Submarine Outlaw series, it has been over two years since the young explorer first set sail in his own submarine, with his dog and seagull crew. Now, almost seventeen, Alfred is on the cusp of switching from exploring the world to playing an active environmentalist role in protecting the …

Sixteen-year-old Darrah is in trouble. She lost her temper and, as a result, Mrs. Johnson, was hurt. Now her parents want her to go to something called a "Restorative Justice" circle that the RCMP suggested. Darrah has to face her parents, Mrs. Johnson, a policewoman, and a "facilitator" who all sit in a circle and decide on Darrah's "sanctions." S …

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 …

An old joke goes like this: What's the difference between a good girl and a nice girl? Answer: The good girl goes to a party, goes home then goes to bed, whereas the nice girl goes to the party, goes to bed, then goes home. The distinction made between the two types of young ladies would probably have been appreciated by Shakespeare. While we think …

In this new edition of Jack Hodgins' Governor General–winning novel (for 1979), the reader is taken into the everyday eccentricities of life in Port Annie on the west coast of Vancouver Island, a town that keeps slipping into the ocean and whose people have long been in a continuous slumber. Everything changes, however, when a beautiful sea nymph …

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 wall …

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, …

In the Sedgewick lecture for 2012, Professor Deborah Cameron investigates the age-old question of whether men and women are different kinds of beings, both physically and intellectually. She begins by noting that in the 19th century that most writers saw men as being intellectually superior to women in their use of language. But she also observes t …

The second volume in the trilogy that revisions Homer's Odyssey is once again told from the viewpoint of Alexi, the young Trojan boy. Captured by Odysseus after the fall of Troy, Alexi is forced to accompany the Greeks on their sea journey home to Ithaca. Cursed by the Sea God contains many of the iconic adventures of the homeward journey, includin …

Father August Brabant (1845–1912) was the first Roman Catholic missionary to live and work among aboriginal people on the west coast of Vancouver Island during the colonial period. He endured long periods of isolation, built a number of log churches and undertook extraordinarily difficult trips along the west coast in dugout canoes. His thirty-thr …

In 1939 the botanist Vladimir Krajina joined the Czech Resistance and quickly became one of its leaders. Incredible escapes from the Gestapo followed while some 20,000 radio messages were sent by his group to London, among them those about the pending invasion of the Balkans and of the Soviet Union. As the strongest anti-Communist Party's general s …

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 …

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 …

In I'll Be Home Soon, Luanne Armstrong takes the reader on a tension-filled ride as Regan, a young girl living in the inner city, searches for her mother who has mysteriously disappeared. Homeless but by no means hapless, Regan is on her own much of the time but also receives help from a wide diversity of people: a young homeless boy like herself, …

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 …

When a young black man named Seraphim "Joe" Fortes arrived in Vancouver in 1885, with little to his name, no one could have possibly suspected that one hundred years later he would be voted "Citizen of the Century." Our Friend Joe is the first biography of the West Indian sailor who became a local legend, saving dozens of lives and teaching three g …

With The Barclay Family Theatre, his second collection of short stories, Jack Hodgins introduces us to a cast of characters who transform the everyday world of Vancouver Island into a wondrous world of human warmth and comic energy. There is Barclay Desmond, caught between the ambitions of his mother, who wants him to become a concert pianist, and …

For many years now theatre directors have argued about how to present Shakespeare's The Tempest. Originally, the play was seen as Prospero's use of magic to reclaim his European heritage against corrupt usurpers. More recently, the play has been produced as a protest against the ongoing colonialism in the new world. In his 2011 Garnett Sedgewick Le …

Pamela Porter's poems celebrate a world awaiting discovery. She opens this new collection with a poem entitled "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." Throughout, one hear …

Captain Richards' journal is an account of three survey seasons on Vancouver Island aboard two British Navy ships, the HMS Plumper and the HMS Hecate. Between 1860 and 1862 Richards and his dedicated crew surveyed and charted the entire coastline of Vancouver Island, creating baseline information for the nautical charts we use today.

This monumental …

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 …

In this 2010 Grand River Forum Lecture, Ted Chamberlin describes how stories give shape and substance to the things we believe in, from scientific theories and sacred texts to literary tales and philosophical propositions. They promote ideals and identities, and sustain institutions and communities. They raise questions about the nature of truth an …

Bertrand W. Sinclair's The Inverted Pyramid, a best-seller when it was first published in 1924, appears now for the first time in a new edition. Writing in the period from 1908 onwards, Sinclair published over fifteen novels, some of which sold in the hundreds of thousands. In The Inverted Pyramid, which critics often cite as his most ambitious nov …

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 …