Mudflat Dreaming tells the story of two communities on Vancouver's waterfront fringes in the 1970s.

On the North Shore, a counter–cultural village of float houses and shacks on stilts sprouted on the estuarial Maplewood Mudflats. A few miles to the south, on the southern banks of the Fraser River above New Westminster, the long–established …

The time is the early 1980s. Judith Plant and her new partner, Kip, are ready for a change. Inspired by the charismatic Fred Brown, their communications professor at Simon Fraser University, they join a commune in a remote valley near the Yalakom River, deep in BC's Coast Mountains. Culture Gap: Towards a New World in the Yalakom Valley tells the s …

A photo portrait of Vancouver's extended "summer of love," Vladimir Keremidschieff's Seize the Time captures an era of profound change in Lotusland. Vlad's infatuation with photography began in 1967 when a friend introduced him to the craft and then left town, taking his 35mm Pentax camera with him — Vlad just had to get one of his own. His bloss …

Visually and conceptually dynamic, Buffet World is Donato Mancini's collection of poems about food, trade and life under late-late-night-snack capitalism. Exploring the relationships between industrial food production, eating, culture, and the politics of language, Mancini organises his controlled palette of words and images around metaphors of con …

City of Love and Revolution takes readers back to Vancouver in the sixties, the decade when everything changed for the Baby Boomer generation. Dozens of rarely seen photos accompany Lawrence Aronsen's account of the tumultuous decade, bringing to life the sights, the sounds, and the passions of the era of psychedelia and free love, when for a brief …

Backup to Babylon collects three shorter works by Maxine Gadd, a writer who has based her life and her work in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside for more than two decades. The first section, "Greenstone," follows an arc between rural life, shaped by idealism, and the city. Feminism, activism, and utopianism are among Gadd's concerns. "Backup to Babylon …

Evicted from his Tofino pyramid for the last time, writer Andrew Struthers has the solution: buy an old fishing boat going cheap via the federal government's Mifflin Plan. He takes up residence onboard with his nine-year-old daughter Pasheabel, and his perennial housing problems are solved. Or are they? The Last Voyage of the Loch Ryan picks up whe …

Surf's up! But don't bother to put on your bikini. This is BC's WET coast, where the water temperature never goes above eleven degrees Celsius. BC surfers have been paddling out to catch waves at Sombrio Beach, Tofino, Ucluelet, and Jordan River for over forty years. Today, a mixture of Vancouver Island's first families of surfing and newcomers to …

We've all read about Hollywood Babylon — the dark side of Tinseltown — but very little about Hollywood Utopia. In her new book, Justine Brown recovers the artistic and idealistic origins of the world's movie capital and its playful and imaginative pioneers. Hollywood Utopia examines the individual lives of the Theosophists (proto-New Agers), th …

The Kootenays, a region of rivers, lakes and mountains in southeastern British Columbia, is home to the kokanee. This landlocked sibling of the sockeye salmon is an extravagant gift from the Pacific Ocean, an elusive flash of molten silver, a lustful reproductive torrent of fire-engine red, a marvel of interior adaptation, an icon of regional cultu …

In 1998, Dzawada'enuxw artist Marianne Nicholson scaled a vertical rock face in Kingcome Inlet to paint a massive pictograph to mark the continued vitality of her ancestral village of Gwa'yi. Two Wolves at the Dawn of Time is the story of that painting, of earlier politically defiant rock art, and of "coppers," ceremonial shields that are a central …

On the edge of adulthood, self-discovery, coming out; in university towns, Europe, Vancouver, Toronto, Sydney, the protagonists of Calendar Boy unravel cultural heritage, community, identity on the road to — they hope — love, happiness, and self-acceptance. Set around the globe, sixteen adventurous stories weave fiction with real-life smarts, g …

This early non-fiction work by critically acclaimed novelist Elizabeth Hay displays the qualities that have resonated with readers — the pitch-perfect register of human psychology, the clear, unsentimental yet intimate sentences — in her bestselling novels A Student of Weather, Garbo Laughs, Late Nights on Air, and Alone in the Classroom. Capti …

Finalist, Bill Duthie Booksellers' Choice Award (1993).

"Chilcotins, they never got beat. Never got beat." — Henry Solomon, in Nemiah: The Unconquered Country

Those words were true in 1864, when the Tsilhqot'in Nation were among the very few First Nations peoples to win a war against European settlers (the Chilcotin War). They were true in 1990, wh …

The year is 1860. A priest, sent on a mission to an Indian village on the coast of British Columbia, believes he is successfully converting the people to Christianity. He is unaware of the anger, selfishness, and love that dictate their actions, and that lead to fatal consequences.

With multiple viewpoints and haunting images, Pauline Holdstock recr …