Lost in Barkerville
A young reader time-travel novel about life in the gold rush town of Barkerville in the Cariboo in 1862. This young reader novel begins with a high school field trip to the former gold rush town of Yale in British Columbia. Here Zach, Kyle, and their eccentric teacher, Miss Reid, are transported back in time to 1866 at the height of the Cariboo gol …
Riding the Continent
Hamilton Mack Laing was an illustrious early British Columbia writer and naturalist. But few know him as how he described himself in his mid-thirties: a motorcycle-naturalist. For several years beginning in 1914, Laing used the motorcycle to access the natural world, believing it gave him a distinct advantage over other forms of transportation. Dur …
Skylight
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 …
Claiming the Land
This trailblazing history of early British Columbia focuses on the 1858 Fraser River gold rush. Marshall's detailed account becomes an adventure, prospecting the rich pay streaks of B.C.'s "founding" event and the gold fever that gripped populations all along the Pacific Slope. In doing so, Marshall unsettles many of our romanticized assumptions ab …
Beautiful Communions
Chrissie Crosby is young, split-second smart and completely pissed off at just about everything. Ginger Flynn is pushing eighty and still seeking answers the way wise people do. These two have much to show each other. Years earlier, a charismatic young professor, Nigel Childes, captivated Ginger while she was one of his students. Their furtive roma …
Song of Batoche
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 …
Railroad of Courage
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 …
Narrow Bridge
Lyric poems that are open to readers; Strong imagery; Poems that describe the need to build "bridges" between people; Interesting accounts of a single woman in Italy; The difficulties involved in learning to age gracefully; The act of writing as a means of living with courage in crossing the narrow bridge of life. COMPARATIVE TITLES: The Road in Is …
Heart Like a Wing
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 one day at her orphanage. They take her to their remote town of Crowsbeak in northern Saskatchewan where Briony, tormented by her schoolmates for her scarred face and dark skin, struggles to fit in. Briony …
The Defiant Mind
"What is a stroke?" This is the question that plagues Ron Smith as he emerges from the carpet bombing of his brain. The Defiant Mind: Living Inside a Stroke is a first-person account of a massive Ischemic stroke to the brain stem. Smith takes the reader inside the experience and shows how recuperation happens — the challenges of communication, th …
Deaf Heaven
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 …
Uncharted Waters
Jim McDowell’s new biography of the little-known Spanish explorer José María Narváez, reveals his significant discoveries during the European exploration of what is now Canada’s Pacific Northwest Coast. Narváez was the first European to investigate a Russian fur-trading outpost in the Gulf of Alaska in 1788. The following year he became the …
Eco Warrior
Recently granted registration papers for his submarine, Alfred is no longer an outlaw and is filled with conviction to become an active environmentalist. But in Perth, Australia, he is mistakenly accused of sabotaging an oil tanker, forcing him to escape overland and to Tasmania. There he meets up with Merwin Hughes, an environmentalist- hippy. Al …
White Oneida, The
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 …
Seas of South Africa
In Seas of South Africa, the sixth volume in the best-selling Submarine Outlaw series, it has been over two years since the young explorer first set sail in his own submarine, with his dog and seagull crew. Now, almost seventeen, Alfred is on the cusp of switching from exploring the world to playing an active environmentalist role in protecting the …
He Moved A Mountain
Dr. Frank Arthur Calder of BC’s Nisga’a First Nation was the first indigenous person to be elected to any Canadian governing body. For twenty-six years he served as an MLA in the legislature of British Columbia. He was the driving force behind Canada’s decision to grant recognition of indigenous land title to First Nations people throughout t …
Resurrection of Joseph Bourne, The
In this new edition of Jack Hodgins' Governor Generalwinning novel (for 1979), the reader is taken into the everyday eccentricities of life in Port Annie on the west coast of Vancouver Island, a town that keeps slipping into the ocean and whose people have long been in a continuous slumber. Everything changes, however, when a beautiful sea nymph …
Hannah & the Salish Sea
In the second volume of her Hannah trilogy, summer has arrived, and fourteen-year-old Hannah Anderson is excited about spending it with Max (who has been giving her stomach butterflies lately). But things are happening in Cowichan Bay that Hannah can’t explain. When a mysterious accident leads her to a nest of starving eaglets, she meets Izzy Tat …
Resurrection of Joseph Bourne
In this new edition of Jack Hodgins’ Governor General–winning novel (for 1979), the reader is taken into the everyday eccentricities of life in Port Annie on the west coast of Vancouver Island, a town that keeps slipping into the ocean and whose people have long been in a continuous slumber. Everything changes, however, when a beautiful sea nym …
Hannah and the Salish Sea
In the second volume of her Hannah trilogy, summer has arrived, and fourteen-year-old Hannah Anderson is excited about spending it with Max (who has been giving her stomach butterflies lately). But things are happening in Cowichan Bay that Hannah can't explain. When a mysterious accident leads her to a nest of starving eaglets, she meets Izzy Tate, …
Father August Brabant
Father August Brabant (18451912) was the first Roman Catholic missionary to live and work among aboriginal people on the west coast of Vancouver Island during the colonial period. He endured long periods of isolation, built a number of log churches and undertook extraordinarily difficult trips along the west coast in dugout canoes. His thirty-thr …
Flicker Tree, The
How do we learn to be where we live? How can a 21st-century mind, saturated with the culture and metaphors of contemporary life, connect to the natural world that surrounds us? In Nancy Holmes' new book of poetry, these questions are asked of her home, the Okanagan valley in the southern interior of British Columbia. In these poems, as Holmes comes …
I'll Be Home Soon
In I’ll Be Home Soon, Luanne Armstrong takes the reader on a tension-filled ride as Regan, a young girl living in the inner city, searches for her mother who has mysteriously disappeared. Homeless but by no means hapless, Regan is on her own much of the time but also receives help from a wide diversity of people: a young homeless boy like herself …
Outlaw in India
In Outlaw in India, the fifth volume in the best-selling Submarine Outlaw series, Alfred and his crew of Seaweed the seagull and Hollie the dog begin their exploration of India with a piece of bad luck when they surface behind a frigate and bring the wrath of the Indian navy down upon them. After a near fatal encounter off Kochi, Alfred befriends a …
Freedom Bound
In this, the final instalment of Jean Rae Baxter's best-selling young adult trilogy, eighteen-year-old Charlotte sails from Canada to Charleston in the beleaguered Thirteen Colonies to join her new husband Nick. During these final months of the American Revolution, she must muster all her wit and courage when she has to rescue Nick from being tortu …
Covenant in Wonder with the World, A
In this 2010 Grand River Forum Lecture, Ted Chamberlin describes how stories give shape and substance to the things we believe in, from scientific theories and sacred texts to literary tales and philosophical propositions. They promote ideals and identities, and sustain institutions and communities. They raise questions about the nature of truth an …
Opening Act, The
The conventional opinion is that professional Canadian theatre began in 1953 with the founding of the Stratford Festival. But Susan McNicoll asks how this could be, when the majority of those taking the stage at Stratford were professional Canadian actors. To answer this question, McNicoll delves into the period to show how in fact the unbroken cha …
Barclay Family Theatre, The
With The Barclay Family Theatre, his second collection of short stories, Jack Hodgins introduces us to a cast of characters who transform the everyday world of Vancouver Island into a wondrous world of human warmth and comic energy. There is Barclay Desmond, caught between the ambitions of his mother, who wants him to become a concert pianist, and …
Charlie
The story of the 100,000 British children who came to Canada as child immigrants between 1870 and 1938 is not well known. Yet the descendants of these “Home Children” number over four million people in Canada today. The author is one of them. Charlie was her father. Charlie is a compelling account of an English boy who is sent to an orphanage f …
Covenant in Wonder with the World, A
In this 2010 Grand River Forum Lecture, Ted Chamberlin describes how stories give shape and substance to the things we believe in, from scientific theories and sacred texts to literary tales and philosophical propositions. They promote ideals and identities, and sustain institutions and communities. They raise questions about the nature of truth an …
Runaway Dreams
Having developed an impressive reputation for his many novels and non-fiction works, Richard Wagamese now presents a collection of stunning poems ranging over a broad landscape. He begins with an immersion in the unforgettable world where "the ancient ones stand at your shoulder . . . making you a circle / containing everything."
These are Medicine …
Run Marco, Run
In this fast-paced novel for readers ten and up, James Graham, a Canadian journalist, is kidnapped in a market in Buenaventura, Colombia, right in front of Marco, his thirteen-year-old son. When the kidnappers try to grab Marco, his father yells at him, “Run Marco, run!” Marco manages to escape, and seeing no possibility of help in Colombia, he …
Spit Delaney's Island
Jack Hodgins‘ first book, published originally in 1976, is once again in print — in a new edition. Winner of the Eaton's Book Prize and nominated for the Governor General's Award, Spit Delaney's Island, a collection of short stories, put Vancouver Island on the map as a Canadian literary locale and set Hodgins off on his literary career. Hodgin …
Broken Trail
Broken Trail is the story a thirteen-year-old white boy, the son of United Empire Loyalists, who has been captured and adopted by the Oneida people. Striving to find his vision oki that will guide him in his quest to become a warrior, Broken Trail disavows his white heritage — he considers himself Oneida. But everything changes when Broken Trail, …
Torn from Troy
Two-and-a half millennia after it was created, Homer's Odyssey remains one of humanity's most memorable adventure stories. In this re-creation of Homer's classic as a young adult novel, we see the aftermath of the Trojan War through the eyes of Alexi, a fifteen-year-old Trojan boy. Orphaned by the war and enslaved by Odysseus himself, Alexi has a v …
