"

When two thousand British bank clerks, butchers, housewives, saleswomen, remittance men and ex-Boer War soldiers followed the charismatic but inept Anglican minister, Isaac Barr, to the Canadian prairies in 1903 their rallying cry was ""Canada for the British.""

Despite the Canadian governmentÌs expectations and BarrÌs assurances, however, very f …

In Courting Saskatchewan, Carpenter captures the poetry of the prairies, confronts the brevity of life and the depression brought on by the dead of a Saskatchewan winter, takes hilarious delight in his own and other people's foibles, and reflects on the importance of his friends. By turns humorous, light hearted and profound, this intensely persona …

Beyond the Northern Lights is a story about the attractions of an outdoor life and how they formed the driving force for my youthful ambitions, culminating in a career as a guardian of the forests and its animal inhabitants. It is also a tribute to things that no longer exist except in my memory - the Calgary of my youth and a simpler, more innocen …

Banana Boots is a one-man-show / memoir in which Fennario recounts, with astonishing insight and wit, the phenomenon of taking his famous bilingual play Balconville to Belfast on a British / Canadian cultural mission. Given the subject of Balconville, that the real problem in Quebec is not one of language or culture, but one of British imperialism …

Sparked by a trip 'home' decades later, Paul Jones begins to remember growing up on the Pembina River, just west of Edmonton. The result is Pembina Country -- a gentle but perceptive look at what it was like to grow up on a hard scrabble farm in the 1930s dust bowl. His finely crafted story recreates the delights and hardships of childhood, no matt …

"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.

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 …

As he cruises the Galapagos Islands in the company of his daughter, aged seven, and his father, aged seventy-three, Paul Quarrington ponders questions great and small. Equal parts memoir, travel book and good old-fashioned yarn, The Boy on the Back of the Turtle is a funny, poignant look at the mysteries of our universe.

The Western Front, the sinuous, deadly line of trenches that stretched from the English Channel to Switzerland during the First World War, also formed a scar on the imaginative landscape of our century.

On the eve of his thirtieth birthday, armed only with a backpack, a compass and a silver hip flask, Stephen O'Shea set out to walk the trenches of …

A publishing oddity, Death Writes: A Curious Notebook is both what you might expect--a handwritten notebook with doodles in the margins and clippings in the back; and what you might not expect--the perspective of Death him/herself, ruminating about the land of the living.
This unusual, stylish book is Death's personal notebook, which has been une …

The Derrick Humphreys Story is a superb biography, a life of adventure that begins in Dickensian England before World War I, then moves to the Western Australian mining frontier of the 1930s and '40s, with excursions into the New Guinea campaign in World War II, the De Beers' South African diamond empire, a foreign aid project in Brazil and the reb …

Bambi and Me consists of 12 autobiographical pieces about how movies shaped the young life of Michel Tremblay, one of their biggest fans. Among others, he talks about Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Cinderella, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, Parade of the Wooden Soldiers, Orphée and the Night Visitors and about how each led to his disco …

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 …

It is the spring of 1963. The young Quebec author Marie-Claire Blais, bursting with energy and talent, has just won a coveted Guggenheim fellowship. She chooses Cambridge, Massachusetts, as the place where she will begin her writer’s apprenticeship with her mentor, Edmund Wilson.
American Notebooks is much more than a fascinating autobiographical …

A first hand account of the trials, tribulations and hardships of Riverboat men and their families lives in the Yukon. Many books have been written about the Klondike gold rush of 1898, and the paddlewheelers that piled the waters of the mighty Yukon and its tributaries. Much less attention has been paid to the folks who lived along the shores of t …

This is the second of five novels in Michel Tremblay’s Plateau Mont-Royal series, an evocative, magical retelling of the author’s own birth, childhood, and adolescence in a working-class Montreal neighbourhood populated by eccentrics, dreamers and imaginary characters of mythic proportions.

Three schoolgirls, “Thérèse ’n’ Pierrette” an …

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 …

A kaleidoscope of aviation stories from a former bush pilot. Bush Flying: The Romance of the North offers readers a kaleidoscope of aviation stories from former bush pilot Robert Grant. Having logged more than 12,000 hours of flight time in the wilds of Canada, Grant takes the reader with him on his travels from coast to coast to coast. From advent …

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 …

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 …

In these poems, Nicholas Catanoy recreates the diary that he kept as a young cadet in Romania when he was imprisoned by the invading Russians. Taken out three times to be executed, Catanoy was one of the few from among the 200 prisoners to survive the random executions. After being released, Catanoy recreated in this memoir the impact of being a pr …

"

Myrna Kostash began the first of her travels into Eastern Europe in the spring of 1982. Over the next six years, she returned many times on a quest that took her into a landscape both foreign and somehow familiar. The result is Bloodlines, a heady brew of travel narrative, history, anecdote, political analysis and childhood memories.

As Kostash jo …

Lost in North America is a caustic, humourous exploration of a Canada we don’t often talk about-a collective mental creation of great charm and complexity, hovering precariously somewhere in Video North America, in disguise as the most successful colony in the history of the world. Lost in North America is a personal, idiosyncratic tour of the co …

George Bowering and Greg Curnoe became friends in London, Ontario, in 1966. Bowering was a 30-year-old poet and university student and Curnoe was a 29-year-old painter who had dropped out of art school in Toronto to return to his place of birth. Their art was in its youth, their eyes and ears were wide open and their stomachs could withstand pots a …

"Late at night and wakeful, I don't count sheep as some do. I have another approach. I fish a reach of my river, a Vancouver Island stream born in mountain country that drops by way of riffles and pools and freshet-carved bars to a Strait of Georgia forty miles away."

So begins this gentle, humorous, engaging memoir: a heartfelt appreciation of Brit …

Crossing Canada by rail has long been among the travel wonders of the world, but in 1990 government cutbacks forced the remarkable Canadian to make its last run from Vancouver to Toronto. Amid the political controversy that raged during the last years of the route's existence, Terry Pindell covered 18,000 miles of Canadian rails. In this fascinatin …

In 1860, at the age of fourteen, Susan Louisa Moir left England for British Columbia. After settling initially at Hope, she lived briefly in both Victoria and New Westminster, then B.C.’s two most important settlements. Returning to Hope, she helped her mother open the community’s first school, and in 1868 she married John Fall Allison, riding …

Mary Meigs is one of the eight women who portray themselves in the film The Company of Strangers, a “semi-documentary” National Film Board production, released in 1990 to overwhelming critical and popular acclaim. Meigs spent two years writing this extraordinary narrative, which begins as her story of being in the film and unfolds into a gentle …

Escaping from Communist Czechoslovakia on skis with his family in 1948, Jan Drabek's experience of World War II was anything but ordinary. Thirteen follows a young Drabek growing up in tumultuous Prague where Nazi propaganda, clandestine BBC radio broadcasts, conspiratorial talk at home and escapist comedies in the theatres provided an unconvention …

In 1857, the French Roman Catholic religious order, the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, began permanent missionary work among the Native peoples of British Columbia. The memoirs of Father Nicolas Coccola, a Corsican-born Oblate who arrived in the province in 1880, reveal the complexity of the work carried out by the ordinary missionary pries …

The Circus Performers’ Bar is a second collection of finely crafted stories by David Arnason, written in every conceivable style: the urbane New Yorker story, the fireside chat, the war correspondent’s report, the poignant personal memoir and the hysterical small-town gossip. Hilarious role reversals and role substitutions provide the context t …

For one year in her life, Mary Meigs and her long-term lover and friend, Marie-Claire Blais, lived in a ménage à trois with the beautiful and powerful “Andrée.” After the end of their stormy three-way relationship, both Marie-Claire and Andrée, who are fiction writers, embodied their memories in novels. The Medusa Head comes from the third …

Autobiographical account of a young couple's adventures homesteading in the Canadian wilderness. Isabel Edwards was in her early twenties when she and her husband Earle began homesteading in British Columbia's remote Bella Coola Valley. What was to be one winter spent in the Northern coastal mountains has become almost fifty years. Witty, whimsical …

Spurred on by reports of gold in the Cariboo, adventurers from all over the world descended on British Columbia in the mid-1800s. Among them were ambitious easterners who accepted the challenge of the shorter but more arduous overland route across the prairies and the Rockies. One such man determined to find his fortune in the West was Thomas McMic …

Taking as her alter-ego Lily Briscoe–the painter in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse–Mary Meigs paints a portrait of herself, her family and her friends in Lily Briscoe: A Self-Portrait, a book that is both autobiography and memoir. In it, she describes the three major decisions of her life: "not to marry, to be an artist" and to listen to he …

It is the glorious second day of May, 1942. The sun is drawing the damp from earth still heavy with the end of a long Quebec winter, the budding branches of the trees along rue Fabre and in Parc Lafontaine of the Plateau Mont Royal ache to release their leaves into the warm, clear air heralding the approach of summer.

Seven women in this raucous Fra …

A modern pioneer story strongly evocative of the undaunted spirit that shaped Western Canada. Gertrude Roger's story opens at the old Cruikshank Ranch near Beechy, Saskatchewan. As a young woman, she marries John Minor and lives, works and raises a family on a large, prosperous cattle ranch. The Minor's later owned the huge Chilco Ranch in the Chil …

This is the memoir/novel that so astonished reviewers in 1979. In it Evans faithfully records his own turn-of-the-century Ontario boyhood through the eyes of a nine year old fictional protagonist, Gilbert Egan.

As one of the most remarkable literary feats by a Canadian, O Time In Your Flight delights more and more readers each year with its technica …