One of the few accounts by care-givers in an Indian Residential School describing the horrific conditions. Nancy Dyson and Dan Rubenstein In 1970, the authors, Nancy Dyson and Dan Rubenstein, were hired as childcare workers at the Alert Bay Student Residence (formerly St. Michael's Indian Residential School) on northern Vancouver Island. Shocked wh …

Here is Leo Tolstoy's first book of "Daily Thoughts," never before translated into English, compiled by Tolstoy in 1906 to share inspiring quotes from more than forty philosophers for each day of the year. Aphorisms and ideas collected by Tolstoy in his other volumes have affected the lives of millions. Among those who were profoundly influenced by …

A collection of poetry by a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto. This collection offers a cycle of poems about the poet who, as a child survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, has had to live with the memories of the Holocaust all her life. The first section describes the evils of suffering and prejudice, of war and destruction, and the loss of loved ones, even t …

In this sequel to the prize-winning French language young reader novel Un rebelle en sous-marin, the sea of myth and legend beckons young Alfred once again. 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 lost Greek island of Atla …

Firebird explores a period in our history - one year in particular (1915-1916) - when a massive number of newcomers were deemed "enemy aliens," arrested and put into internment camps set up all across Canada. Alex Kaminsky, a fourteen-year-old Ukrainian immigrant boy, suffers burns to his hands and face when his uncle's farmhouse burns down. Rescue …

"I'm going to get you, my pretty!" The enigmatic Sick Witch lures the narrator on a metaphoric/literal vision quest through the hallucinatory terrain of undiagnosed and undiagnosable medical disorders in poems that playfully explore connections between physical and mental illness. Compelling "fever dreams" tackle disorders, from allergy to somnambu …

In writing Itineraries, Philip Resnick has focused on a number of influences and currents that have shaped his intellectual life. It begins with his early years, growing up Jewish in Montreal and his subsequent break with organized religion. This is followed by his encounters with nationalism - Québécois, Canadian, Catalan, and that of a number o …

Secrets in the Shadows is the account of best friends Michael and Wolfie who are boys growing up in Nazi Germany. Both of them are delighted to join the Hitler Youth. But by the time the boys are twelve, a devastating event turns their world upside down. On a school trip to Berlin, the boys see a beautiful Jewish girl boarding the train with her mo …

The previously untold story of a remarkable British Columbian

His name was Horace Wrinch. It was 1880. He was 14 years old, a farmer's boy from England travelling on his own to Quebec. Twenty years later, a qualified doctor and surgeon, he arrived in Hazelton on the Skeena River in northern British Columbia as a Canadian citizen. At this time the no …

These poems featuring the brilliant, the misfit, and the music of the stars summon us into the heart of what it means to be human and passionate on this wild ride we call life on Earth. Mileva Einstein, the forgotten genius; Josef Stalin's only daughter, as she flies off to the US; Robert Schumann, composing symphonies from an asylum; the view from …

Garry Gottfriedson's Clinging to Bone digs into the marrow, heart and soul of the human condition. Looking deeply into the Secwepemc (Shuswap) world of today, he examines betrayal, grief, love and survival. He states, "the broken winged sparrows are lost in flight, surviving starvation in the empty belly of wind." In "Foreigner" he describes how "m …

In this superb new collection of poetry, Antony Di Nardo explores the interplay between a disintegrating natural world and the human observer, a relationship characterized by both beauty and terror. “A talking tree, a talking tree / in the language of dead leaves” ends a poem in the award-winning suite, “May June July,” where cancer cells a …

Acclaimed for his superior craftsmanship (“half the meaning of a lyric poem is in the music”) and his summoning of sentiment without sentimentality, John Donlan in his sixth collection confronts our inevitable sense of loss and mourning as we live through the sixth extinction of the natural world. Yet always his work reveals the comfort and cou …

High in the Canadian Arctic, British art historian Jenny pursues her passions: Inuit art and a handsome geologist. But the sudden news that her mother has suffered a stroke reels Jenny back to her old life — the responsible youngest daughter of parents who gave up everything to join a religious cult. In Inverness, Jenny tries to put the jumbled p …

Passageways is a major collection of Philip Resnick’s poetry, spanning over 40 years. A number of the poems in the first section of the book, “Of the Greeks and Hebrews,” were in earlier collections, which have long been out of print. The other four sections of the book tackle a wide variety of topics. “Faraway Shores” evokes various plac …

“All the world is a narrow bridge,” states Rabbi Nachman of Bresnov. “The important thing is not to be afraid at all.” These poems, Barbara Pelman’s third collection, explore bridges both real and metaphoric: the bridge connecting Denmark to Sweden where her family lives; the bridges she has travelled across Europe; and the bridges we bui …

This historical novel reimagines the North-West resistance of 1885 through the Métis women of Batoche, and in particular the rebellious outsider, Josette Lavoie. When Riel arrives from Montana, he discovers that Josette is the granddaughter of Chief Big Bear, whom he needs as an ally, but Josette resists becoming his disciple when she learns that …

This young reader novel about the Underground Railroad begins when Rebecca, a twelve-year-old slave in South Carolina, hears that Grower Brown plans to sell her father to another grower. Unwilling to accept the idea of slavery any longer, she shocks her parents by declaring that she will run away, with or without them. Despite their fear, they agre …

Louis Riel, prophet of the new world and founder of the Canadian province of Manitoba, has challenged Canadian politics, history and religion since the early years of Confederation. In Canada’s most important and controversial state trial, Riel was found guilty of “high treason,” sentenced to hang and executed on November 16, 1885. With 2017 …

The poems in Collecting Silence arc through youth, love and loss, to maturation, aging, peace. Wide travels throughout Asia, Europe and North America bring Narwani face to face with the oppressions of poverty, caste and religion, as well as the seductions of magical new beauty. The poems take the reader down the Chao Phraya River in Bangkok, to Cho …

This translation into English of Alain Dubuc's best-seller, Portrait de Famille, questions our national identity, if there is one, and how it may be more in flux than ever before. The Rest of Canada sees Quebec in a number of ways, while the Québécois see themselves in still others, in a set of supposedly homemade myths. Dubuc asks and analyzes t …

Briony, a prairie girl with a disfigured face, is adopted when she is nine by a childless older couple, Dagget and Moll, who appear mysteriously at her orphanage one day. They take her to their remote town of Crowsbeak in northern Saskatchewan, where Briony struggles to fit in. Tormented by her schoolmates for her scarred face and dark skin, and ha …

In Defending Darkness, starting over is a constant theme as Pamela Porter explores what wisdom can be gained in “waiting on the heart to finish her grieving,” and then to move on — across borders, through time, even into eternity. These poems carry the adversity we all must endure with a kind of singing that is “older than praise, younger t …

In this compelling tale, two very different stories intersect with surprising results. There's the story of two African children, Kalu and his cousin, Aisha, who escape from their village after it's destroyed by rebel soldiers. The kids flee to the coast where they find work on a fishing boat bound for Britain. They think they're safe, until the ne …

As the title suggests, this new collection of poetry from Garry Gottfriedson of the Secwepemc (Shuswap) Nation deals with the ways in which the world is deaf to the problems First Nations people face in Canada today. Gottfriedson examines such issues as the Truth and Reconciliation movements as well as the missing and murdered Aboriginal women. The …

In his 2015 Garnett Sedgewick lecture, award-winning poet and literary critic Stephen Burt discusses the relation of poetry to time, space and place. He examines the widespread and popular view of contemporary critics who claim that modern lyric poetry is supposed to have a speaking self who resides outside of space and time, and addresses readers …

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 instill. Some of the poems have a critical political edge, while others …

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 invisible force. From John Constable’s home at East Bergholt to the shattered streets of Nanking, China, in 1937, Meyer offers …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 bur …

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. …

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 …

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 …

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 …