- canadian (115)
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- literary (52)
- personal memoirs (52)
- western provinces (50)
- essays (41)
- history (41)
- native american (30)
- marine life (24)
- short stories (single author) (22)
- environmental conservation & protection (21)
- native american studies (21)
- adventurers & explorers (19)
- historical (18)
- reference (18)
- fishing (17)
- native canadian (17)
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- cultural heritage (13)
A River Captured
A River Captured explores the controversial history of the Columbia River Treaty and its impact on the ecosystems, Indigenous peoples, contemporary culture, cross-border politics and recent history of the Pacific Northwest.
Long lauded as a model of international co-operation, the Columbia River Treaty governs the storage and management of the wate …
O Canada Crosswords Book 22
Over 250,000 O Canada Crosswords books sold in twenty years!
O Canada Crosswords rides again with the twenty-second instalment of this popular series, which features large-sized puzzles split between Canadian and other themes. With over 20 per cent of the clues focusing on Canadiana, you’ll be chomping at the bit as author Gwen Sjogren harnesses h …
Indigenous Empowerment through Co-management
Co-management boards, established under comprehensive land claims agreements, have become key players in land-use planning, wildlife management, and environmental regulation across Canada’s North. This book provides a detailed account of the operation and effectiveness of these boards while addressing a central question: Have they been successful …
The Okanagan Wine Tour Guide
The definitive guide to Interior BC wineries, covering the Okanagan, Similkameen, Thompson and Kootenays. With updated maps and travel tips, it’s your ultimate glove-box guide, now in a newly expanded and updated edition.
For nearly fifteen years Okanagan Wine Tour Guide has been the definitive companion for travelling the winding roads of BC’s …
Panegyric
When underachieving writer Larry Mann is granted the lucrative opportunity to ghostwrite the memoirs of the notorious and eccentric businessman-turned-politician Maxime Montblanc, he accepts immediately, tantalized by the financial benefits he’s promised. However, as the two men begin to learn about and confide in one another, hints of their past …
Seven Floors Down
Seven Floors Down follows the lives of Ryder and Kendall through bouts of homicide and homelessness, beginning when Ryder gets out of jail and crashes with his alcoholic friend who, on the verge of being evicted, remains infuriated with an ex-cop who owes him thousands. Kendall is a raconteur who entertains with countless stories, often while lying …
Mad Cow
Told from two points of view—a mother and her daughter—Mad Cow examines farming life in small-town Alberta, a life fourteen-year-old Allyson wants only to escape. Meanwhile her mother, Donna, dealing with her own assortment of problems and setbacks, soldiers on through the daunting days. But when a strange affliction starts picking off the loca …
You Suck, Sir
By the creator/co-creator of the podcasts The Black Tapes and The Big Loop: reading between the lines of the hilarious conversations between a teacher and his students.
Before he became a famous stand-up comedian and podcast creator, Paul Bae taught English in Vancouver's largest public school. One day during his student-teaching practicum, he assig …
Please Stand By
Preying on loving parents is second nature to Suzanne Foley. So is drinking to oblivion while shilling for the publicly-supported Alberta Broadcasting System (ABS). When new management from Toronto threatens to gut the station, Suzanne rallies reluctant coworkers to fight back. Sex with a younger man, intrusive memories and regular trips to the pre …
Viaticum
When Annika Torrey is diagnosed with cancer, she has no one in her life she can turn to. Divorced and estranged from her fundamentalist family, she sells her life insurance policy for cash, hoping to live out her final days in peace. But then Annika is given a rare second chance. Meanwhile, struggling real-estate agent Matt Campbell is drowning in …
Fireweed and Bracken
Highlighting the tension between insiders and outsiders, and set against a sinister backdrop, Fireweed and Bracken follows the life of Effie Cambridge who, awkward and searching, leaves her complicated life in Ontario to work as a high school teacher in Charlottetown, PEI, where she makes friends, courts rejection, finds love, and struggles to come …
Cheap Thrills
Cheap Thrills takes place over the course of a single weekend, beginning with the incessantly stoned Ethan and his roommate Phil discovering the body of their weed dealer in a Vancouver alley alongside a box of porno magazines and crime noir paperbacks. Tasked by his eccentric boss with locating the money the dealer had been carrying, gang member W …
Light a Candle / Tumaini pasipo na Tumaini
Co-written by Eric Walters and Godfrey Nkongolo, Light a Candle weaves non-fiction with fiction to tell the story of a boy coming of age in the shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro.
The son of the village's chief climbs the mountain against his father’s wishes to fulfill a request of the country’s first leader, Julius Nyerere, to light a candle on the t …
Rebent Sinner
Governor General's Literary Award finalist; BC Book Prize winner (Jim Deva Prize for Writing that Provokes); Forest of Reading Evergreen Award finalist
Ivan Coyote is one of North America's preeminent storytellers and performers, and the author, co-author, or co-editor of eleven previous books, all but one of which have been published by Arsenal Pul …
Mountain Man
Life was one big adventure for Hiram Cody Tegart. At times unbelievable and others just downright impressive, Mountain Man is the celebration of a legend of a man and a legendary way of life that is quickly disappearing.
Cody was born in 1950 on a ranch in BC's Columbia Valley. The bush that surrounded his family's farm was the best playground any k …
Highballer
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 …
I Could Have Pretended to Be Better Than You
Spanning more than 25 years, I Could Have Pretended to Be Better Than You gathers work from three distinct eras of Jay Millar's development as a poet: the wonder years of the 1990s culled from a variety of self-published micropress publications, most of which are hiding in special collections; poems from his trade books issued between 2000 and 2015 …
A Field Guide to Marine Life of the Outer Coasts of the Salish Sea and Beyond
The common marine life of the transition waters and more exposed coasts of the Salish Sea are abundant and diverse: giant green anemones, amazing sea stars and thick kelp forests. This eight-fold field guide is a useful aid to coastal exploration from BC to Washington and beyond with over seventy colour photographs to help explorers identify the mo …
A Field Guide to Marine Life of the Protected Waters of the Salish Sea
Rick Harbo, one of the Pacific Northwest’s leading marine writers and photographers, is back with a new addition to Harbour Publishing’s popular series of pocket-sized field guides. A Field Guide to Marine Life of the Protected Waters of the Salish Sea includes the most commonly observed species in the tide pools and protected waters of the Sal …
New Ground
In the late fifties, Ann Kujundzic, her husband and artist Zeljko, and three children--with a fourth on the way--packed up their lives in post-war Edinburgh and emigrated to the Kootenays in BC, seeking adventure and opportunity. In Nelson, Ann was involved in establishing the Kootenay School of Art in 1960, a remarkable institution whose history h …
Vanishing Fish
"Daniel Pauly is a friend whose work has inspired me for years."
—Ted Danson, actor, ocean activist, and co-author of Oceana
"This wonderfully personal and accessible book by the world’s greatest living fisheries biologist summarizes and expands on the causes of collapse and the essential actions that will be required to rebuild fish stocks for …
The Hot Springs Cove Story
Up until the 1930s, Refuge Cove was one of the most remote places on the West Coast of Vancouver Island. Tucked into Clayoquot Sound, it sheltered boats from Pacific storms and its hot springs provided welcome relief for anyone waiting for bad weather to pass. In spite of its natural wonders, the cove was undeveloped and transiently populated. But …
Sockeye Silver, Saltchuck Blue
Praise for Hello Humpback!, the inaugural title in the First West Coast Books series:
“Graceful, well-constructed rhymes pair with First Nations artist Vickers’s crisp, luminous scenes… It’s a gorgeous glimpse of the distinctive landscapes and creatures of the Northwest, and it will enchant residents and nonlocals alike.”
—starred review, …
The New Beachcomber's Guide to the Pacific Northwest
The Pacific Northwest coast is home to one of the most diverse displays of intertidal marine life in the world, including sponges, clams, snails, crabs, sea stars, sea anemones, jellies, fishes, seaweeds and more. The New Beachcomber’s Guide to the Pacific Northwest is a portable and easy-to-use reference for searching out and identifying the hun …
The Lieutenant Governors of British Columbia
The office of Lieutenant Governor has been a constant in British Columbia from the province’s colonial beginnings to the modern era. Originally tasked with selecting the province’s premier and giving royal assent to provincial legislation, and invested with the power to dismiss governments, the role of the Crown’s representative has continual …
Raincoast Chronicles 24
Of the settlers, prospectors, trappers, mountaineers and loggers who came to British Columbia’s remote Bute Inlet between the 1890s and the 1940s, few remained long. August Schnarr, however, trapped far up the Homathko and Southgate Rivers and logged the inlet shores from 1910 until the 1960s. An adventurous photographer, August strapped his Koda …
Damaged at Daybreak
Although Evan Marshall has done time, he is more of a freelance hack and fly-by-night adventurer than a criminal. His life takes yet another detour when he becomes involved with an over-the-top personality named Lawson--not only a playwright, actor, novelist, would-be priest and teacher, but a self-destructive alcoholic, drug addict and part-time m …
Strange September of Levi Pepperfield, The
This is the story of Levi Pepperfield, who tries to navigate his future as a retired English professor while indulging in the sorrow of lost possibilities that define his past. It's about the intersection of parallel worlds, of age and youth, of teacher and student, of man and woman, of real and fictional characters. Levi needs to discover his guid …
Vita
Angst, seduction, escape and extinction control these many tales--a whisper in the ear convinces a lady to take the plunge, another to take up surfing, and a young man to jump in front of a moving train--and there is joy in settling a score with despised neighbours and a conspiracy under the California sun. Some sketches are laced with passion and …
Mooncalves
Mooncalves follows the bloody implosion of a cult in Sainte-Pétronille, Quebec, understood through the urgent voices of the living and a ring of ghostly, shape-shifting watchers. Sensing the impending dissolution of society by technological progress, the charismatic, utterly unhinged Joseph Reiser forms “Walden”, a collective of Luddite devote …
The Strange September of Levi Pepperfield
This is the story of Levi Pepperfield, who tries to navigate his future while indulging in the sorrows of his past. With the intersection of parallel worlds—of age and youth, of teacher and student, of man and woman, of real and fictional characters—and the help of a female rabbi, a former student, and a succession of literary giants both real …
Vita
Angst, seduction, escape and extinction control these many tales—a whisper in the ear convinces a lady to take the plunge, another to take up surfing, and a young man to jump in front of a moving train—and there is joy in settling a score with despised neighbours and a conspiracy under the California sun. Some sketches are laced with passion an …
The Co-op Revolution
"We were undercapitalized, inexperienced, practiced democratic decision-making and some of us smoked dope occasionally. All elements that would make us grow as human beings and as business people. We ran a helluva show.''
In the spring of 1975, a free-spirited Jan DeGrass backpacked across Canada in search of adventure and greater meaning in life. W …
George Garrett
“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 …
Being Chinese in Canada
After the Canadian Pacific Railway was completed in 1885—construction of the western stretch was largely built by Chinese workers—the Canadian government imposed a punitive head tax to deter Chinese citizens from coming to Canada. The exorbitant tax strongly discouraged those who had already emigrated from sending for wives and children left in …
Tiny House, Big Fix
Sadie works as a framer, building houses. She lost her own home in a recent divorce and now lives with her two daughters in a rented bungalow. When her landlady says she needs to move out, Sadie finds there's a housing crisis in her community. She can't find a place to live and is forced to move her family into a travel trailer at a local campsite. …
Nationhood Interrupted
Traditionally, nêhiyaw (Cree) laws are shared and passed down through oral customs — stories, songs, ceremonies — using lands, waters, animals, land markings and other sacred rites. However, the loss of the languages, customs, and traditions of Indigenous peoples as a direct result of colonization has necessitated this departure from the oral …
What the Poets Are Doing
In 2002, Nightwood published Where the Words Come From: Canadian Poets in Conversation, a successful first-of-its-kind collection of interviews with literary luminaries like Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Margaret Avison, Patrick Lane, Lorna Crozier and P.K. Page, conducted by “the younger generation” of poets of the day. Sixteen years late …
Iron Road West
British Columbia wouldn’t exist without the railway; the province was brought into the Canadian Confederation in 1871 in exchange for the promise of a transcontinental line to the West Coast. It was the arrival of the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1886 that set off economic development in the province, created the city of Vancouver and spurred othe …
He Speaks Volumes
This biography of George Bowering, first Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate, reveals the intimate, intellectual, and artistic life of one of Canada’s most prolific authors, offering an inside look at the people and events at the centre of the country’s literary and artistic avant-garde from the 1960s to the present.
A distinguished novelist, p …
Shoelaces Are Hard
Mike McCardell’s instinct for finding the perfect story at just the right time has led him to a lifetime of great scoops and gripping tales as an author and Vancouver news icon. Years of chasing and reporting human-interest stories have honed his ability to see the deeper meaning behind the everyday, and to capture the universal and familiar in e …
Dreamers and Designers
West Vancouver is a community defined by its geography, bordered on three sides by the ocean, backed by mountainous wilderness and threaded by creeks and ravines. This setting gives the region a distinct identity, attracting people from all over the world with the prospect of stunning scenery and unparalleled opportunities for outdoor activity, but …
Live at The Cellar
In the 1950s and ’60s, co‐operative jazz clubs such as Vancouver’s Cellar, Edmonton’s Yardbird Suite, and Halifax’s 777 Barrington Street opened their doors in response to new forms of jazz expression emerging after the war and a lack of available performance spaces outside major urban centres. Operated on a not‐for-profit basis by the …