In 1983, at nineteen, Greg Nolan was hired (reluctantly) by his older sister’s boyfriend—a treeplanting contractor based in Northern British Columbia. His crewmates didn’t know what to think of the wide-eyed kid whose mom drove him the 750 kilometres to hook up with his first job. But within a week, Nolan was hitting the thousand-trees-a-day …

“George Garrett is one of the most remarkable reporters of news that I have ever known. He has always had the ability to smell a good story and to report on it honestly and accurately.”

—Jim Pattison, Canadian business magnate

Starting from humble beginnings as a farm boy in Saskatchewan, George Garrett rose through the ranks of journalism and …

“... without a doubt the greatest poet English Canada has ever produced.”

—Dennis Lee

“A hundred years from now, one of the few Canadian poets whose work will still be read will be Al Purdy.”

—Maclean’s

Al Purdy (1918–2000), known as Canada’s unofficial poet laureate, wrote poetry that anyone could read. Having come from working-class …

In 1888, a prosperous industrial family in Calne, Wiltshire, sent one of its younger sons, a lad judged to have no head for business, to Guelph Agricultural College in Ontario to learn to be a farmer.

Joseph Colebrook Harris, the author’s grandfather, didn’t take to Ontario and after visiting a friend on Salt Spring Island, fell in love with BC. …

What do you do when you decide you no longer want to be responsible for anyone but yourself? When faced with that moment, Donna Kane leaves her twenty-five-year marriage for life with a conservationist and wilderness guide who is so certain of the path he is on that she thinks she’s just along for the ride.

A few days before Kane’s new husband l …

At age nineteen, Pat Ardley packed up her belongings and left Winnipeg for Vancouver, looking for adventure. Little did she know that she’d spend the next forty years in the wilderness, thirty of which would be spent with a man known as George “Hurricane” Ardley. Pat met George soon after arriving in Vancouver, and not long after that the two …

"At first I'm calm as the trees fall. But suddenly a rat's nest of wood, bent horizontal and cribbed into the trees above us, comes down in a rush of a hundred machine gun snaps. Trees caught in the nest flail around before hitting the ground. Our eyes dart everywhere, trying to keep track of every moment. Trees break free and swing themselves like …

In 1970, twenty-two-year-old Thom Henley left Michigan and drifted around the northwest coast, getting by on odd jobs and advice from even odder characters. He rode the rails, built a squatter shack on a beach, came to be known as "Huckleberry" and embarked on adventures along the West Coast and abroad that, just like his Mark Twain namesake, situa …

Living alone in the remote wilderness, Chris Czajkowski has given her dogs a rich life, although not without its difficulties. Often residing in areas accessible only by float plane, the dogs have encountered grizzlies and cougars, slept in the snow, hiked with packs of food and equipment, and occasionally gotten themselves into scrapes, such as be …

"Call me Chick. I've been called Chick since I was six years old. If you call me Donald, I'll know you don't know me. In this story, I'll tell you how my life unfolded over the last eight decades: how I got that nickname; how I met and married the most beautiful girl in the world; and how I came to own and operate S & R sawmills in Surrey, British …

Like John Muir, David Pitt-Brooke stepped out for a walk one morning--a long walk of a thousand kilometres or more through the arid valleys of southern interior British Columbia. He went in search of beauty and lost grace in a landscape that has seen decades of development and upheaval. In Crossing Home Ground he reports back, providing a day-by-da …

Gerry St. Germain's story begins in "Petit Canada" on the shores of the Assiniboine, growing up with his two younger sisters, his mother and his father--a shy Metis trapper and construction worker who sometimes struggled to put food on the table. St. Germain was initially troubled in school, scrapping with classmates and often skipping out to shoot …

Red Robinson details the life and career of Red Robinson, one of Canada's most celebrated pioneers of rock and roll. Robinson began spinning hits while in high school in the early 1950s, laying the foundation for what would become a glamorous, impossible-to-stop and ultimately fulfilling career that has made him a household name west of the Rockies …

The inspiring story behind today's craft beer revolution is the subject of this lively memoir by Frank Appleton, the English-trained brewmaster who is considered by many to be the father of Canada's craft-brewing movement. Appleton chronicles fifty years in the brewing business, from his early years working for one of the major breweries, to his pa …

Each fisherman steps onto the docks, sees Peter Gordon's boat the MV Kalua, glances at the other members of the charter and feels a rush of anticipation. The challenge is on to see who will catch the biggest fish.

Told with a skipper's authority, Stalking Salmon and Wrestling Drunks recounts the highs and lows of fishing with tourists, including de …

The name Farrell is synonymous with quality boats to those in the know up and down the British Columbia coast. Working in and around Pender Harbour on the Sunshine Coast, Barrie's father, Allen Farrell, was a much loved eccentric and noted wooden boat builder who created offshore sailing vessels from beachcombed lumber using only basic hand tools. …

For decades, Hudson Mack has been the face of television news on Vancouver Island. In 2004, when he "crossed the street" from CHEK to The New VI, it was an industry-wide sensation. As he recalls that life-changing event in this autobiography he admits he wasn't sure where his new path might lead. CHEK was established, respected and popular in Victo …

In 2007, Caroline Woodward was itching for a change. With an established career in book-selling and promotion, four books of her own and having raised a son with her husband, Jeff, she yearned for adventure and to re-ignite her passion for writing. Jeff was tired of piecing together low-paying part-time jobs and, with Caroline's encouragement, appl …

Frank White started writing the story of his life as a pioneer BC truck driver in 1974 when he was only sixty. His boisterous yarn in Raincoast Chronicles about wrangling tiny trucks overloaded with huge logs down steep mountains with no brakes won the Canadian Media Club award for Best Magazine Feature and was reprinted so many times everyone urge …

In its heyday in the 1950s and '60s, the remote community of Elsa, 300 miles north of Whitehorse in the Yukon Territory, was the epicentre of one of the world's most lucrative silver mining operations--an enterprise that far surpassed the riches produced during the iconic Klondike gold rush. For twelve of those years, Gerald Priest was the chief as …

This print-on-demand title is available by request from most booksellers.

When Elsie Hulsizer was little, she lived on the shores of Puget Sound in Washington where she spent the summers sailing in a small open sailboat with her parents. Her parents would always start out by sailing to windward, or against the wind, so they would have an easy ride …

Ex-logger and gas station owner Frank White says living to the age of one hundred is not all it's cracked up to be but it has some plusses. When he trundles down to the local shopping centre in Pender Harbour pretty girls hug him and everybody in town seems to be glad he's lived another day. But celebrity has its drawbacks--when he was only fifty a …

"Lane is a poet more of the individual, hard-hitting poem; like physical blows, he wields his pieces like small threats of intense beauty."
--Globe and Mail

Following the success of his award-winning memoir There is a Season (2004) and his bestselling novel Red Dog, Red Dog (2008), Patrick Lane felt his celebrated poetry career might be at an end an …

Bestselling author and TV personality Mike McCardell, known for his humorous and touching portraits of ordinary BC lives, turns a new page and crafts a bittersweet memoir of his own hardscrabble childhood in New York City.

Written with all the warmth and ironic humour his fans have come to know and love, Cardboard Ocean is an affectionate evocation …

Retired fishery officer Randy Nelson's first love was catching poachers. That obsession, plus a devious mind and enthusiasm for marathon running, spelled big trouble for law-breaking fishermen. Thirty-five years in the field (and stream) netted a gold mine of stories: with hair-raising tales of grizzly bear attacks; angry axe-wielding, rock-throwin …

Roderick L. Haig-Brown is one of the world's most beloved and popular fly-fishing writers. His books bring together exquisite prose and the limitless art and joy of fishing, along with solid and timeless advice.

First published in 1959, and the most popular of Haig-Brown's fishing titles, Fisherman's Summer includes absorbing descriptions of fishing …

Here, at last, is a book about commercial salmon fishing, by well-known fisherman and industry analyst Dr. Don Pepper--one that is sure to become a West Coast classic. Pepper fished salmon as a crewman every season from 1953 to 1969. After a hiatus in the '70s, he returned to fishing in the '80s, balancing his life at sea with a career as a profess …

Christine Allen and Michael Kluckner's portrayal of life on Killara Farm moves thoughtfully through a year of gardening with a rich, detailed narrative that evokes the many pleasures of life in rural Southwestern BC.

Allen, a master gardener, is also a lyrical writer, expressing the tiny details of life on the farm--the "winter jasmine, doggedly flo …

Diana Phillips, daughter of Canadian folk legend Pan Phillips, shares more extraordinary tales about her life on the ranch in the remote British Columbian backcountry.

Two years after publishing Beyond the Chilcotin, her remarkable memoir about growing up on her famous father's pioneer ranch in the Chilcotin, Diana Phillips continues her story. Dis …

"Oliver Dubois told me about the time he got in a fight with another guy and all the men came out to see the fun. He said he knocked the guy out cold, but he didn't fall down because there were so many Kleins standing around. He went on to name all of them and he said even Klein Klein was there. He was trying to make the point that at one time ther …

Former RCMP Sergeant Charlie Scheideman, author of Policing the Fringe: The Curious Life of a Small-Town Mountie, is back with the same wry humour and a new collection of incredible stories drawn from his twenty-seven years of patrolling the small communities of the interior of British Columbia.

These new adventures have him re-polishing his boots …

A witty, brightly-written memoir of childhood in the Yukon, The Cinnamon Mine traces the adventures of the Porsild family from Denmark to Greenland, through Arctic Canada, and finally to remote Johnson's Crossing , where they operated one of the first tourist lodges on the Alaska Highway.

Author Ellen Davignon recalls the early years when three kids …

Rumble Seat is an evocative, poetically-written memoir of artist Helen Piddington's childhood in the Victoria suburb of Esquimalt--and what a childhood it was! The Piddingtons arrived from Quebec in 1924, and settled into a life that in many ways typified well-off Victoria families of the period. Helen's father, Major Arthur Grosvenor Piddington, w …

Pioneers Pan Phillips and his partner Rich Hobson carved their places in ranching history when they discovered "grass beyond the mountains" in the far reaches of the Chilcotin. Thanks to a series of hugely popular books, their exploits became the stuff of legend and Phillips became one of Canada's enduring folk heroes.

But if a man had to be tough …

At age seventeen, Jim Taylor began a career in writing as part-time high school sports reporter. Forty-eight years, some 7,500 five-a-week columns, three times as many radio shows and twelve books later, Jim Taylor is undeniably one of Canada's most loved sports writers. In Hello, Sweetheart? Gimmie Rewrite!, Taylor looks back at half a century of …

"People go north for a variety of reasons, some stay for a lifetime, while others can't wait to leave at the end of whatever term they have signed on for. The north tends to be either loved or hated with equal passion." These are the words of Keith Billington, who with his wife Muriel, arrived in the Northwest Territories outpost of Fort McPherson, …

"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 …

Doreen Armitage, author of the bestselling From the Wheelhouse: Tugboaters Tell their own Stories, is back with a fresh collection of salty tales from a varied collection of men who earn their living in, on or beside the sea. A former DFO skipper tells a heartrending story of trying to rescue the crew of a fish boat foundering off the west coast of …

British Columbia's Jedediah Island is now a popular marine park, 640 acres of natural splendour tucked in between Texada and Lasqueti islands in the Strait of Georgia. But when Mary Palmer and her husband purchased the island half a century ago, they found out it could be challenging indeed to live in an isolated coastal paradise.

Jedediah Days is a …

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 …

In the late 1980s, Chris Czajkowski left her truck at the end of a logging road 300 kilometres north of Vancouver and hiked for two days on unmarked wilderness trails to the site of what would become her home. This is her account of building three log cabins, an eco-tourism business and a life beside an unnamed lake 5,000 feet high in the Coast Ran …

In 1907, Laura Beatrice Berton, a 29-year-old kindergarten teacher, left her comfortable life in Toronto Ontario to teach in a Yukon mining town. She fell in love with the North--and with a northerner--and made Dawson City her home for the next 25 years. I Married the Klondike is her classic and enduring memoir.

When she first arrived by steamboat …

For much of the legendary BC politician-cum-hotliner's career, calling him a socialist would have risked a scorching riposte if not a punch in the nose, but in his latest book that is the label he gives himself. Has the old warrior gone over to the other side? Well, not exactly. Rafe Mair has dominated the British Columbia airwaves for years, pulli …

Some say Mike McCardell's "feel-good" stories that cap the six o'clock evening news on BCTV are the best part of the program - the only reason they watch the news. One thing is certain, over the years McCardell has earned the loyalty of hundreds of thousands of fans. In this, his first book, he presents an intriguing and often hilarious behind-the- …

"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 …

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 …

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 …