After his father, Saul, undergoes brain surgery and slips into a coma, Howard Akler begins to reflect on Saul's life, the complicated texture of consciousness, and Akler's struggles with writing and his own unpredictable mind. With echoes of Paul Auster's The Invention of Solitude and Philip Roth's Patrimony, Men of Action treads the line between m …

Selected for The Globe 100 Books in 2013.

In The Truth about Luck, Iain Reid, author of the highly popular coming-of-age memoir One Bird's Choice, accompanies his grandmother on a five-day vacation — which turns out to be a "staycation" at his apartment in Kingston. While the twenty-eight-year-old writer is at the beginning of his adult life, his …

6 Essential Questions tells the story of Renata as she travels to Brazil to reunite with the mother who abandoned her when she was just five years old. In Rio, Renata discovers more than she bargained for in her quest to uncover the truth of who abandoned whom. She is continually tossed about by her undead grandmother and a semi-invisible uncle as …

A delectable satirical novel about celebrity culture, journalism, truth, lies, consequences — about the fictions we tell ourselves and the fictions we tell others.

Augusta Price (not her real name) is famous in England for playing a slatternly barmaid on a nighttime soap opera and for falling down drunk in public. Now, she has no job, no relations …

Bill Graham – Canada’s minister of foreign affairs and minister of defence during the tumultuous years following 9/11 – takes us on a personal journey from his Vancouver childhood to important behind-the-scenes moments in recent global history. With candour and wit, he recounts meetings with world leaders, contextualizes important geopolitica …

A colourful memoir of growing up on the south side of St. John’s, Newfoundland, in the 1940s and 1950s. Porter brings to life the lost community of her childhood, and introduces us to the vibrant characters who lived there.

As a longtime pediatrician, Richard Goldbloom placed a high value on connecting with and communicating with his patients and their parents. His ability to reach an audience is evident in this engaging memoir of his life.

Born and raised in a Jewish medical family in Montreal at a time when the gulf between English and French was deep, Goldbloom's ph …

For 100 years, Wood’s Homes has offered a lifeline to children and their families who have nowhere else to turn. A multiservice, non-profit children’s mental health organization based in Calgary, Wood’s Homes serves communities throughout Alberta and in the Northwest Territories. In honour of the 100th anniversary of Wood’s Homes in 2014, t …

The distinguished Arabic scholar, author, and translator Issa J. Boullata grew up in a Palestinian family in the Jerusalem of the 1930s and 1940s, when Palestine was under the British Mandate. His memoir, The Bells of Memory, is delightful in its reflections on an idyllic youth and detailed in its recollections of family members, classmates and tea …

A Migrant Heart is about departures and arrivals, uprooting and attachment, resettling and returning. Denis Sampson left Ireland as a student, leaving behind the farming countryside of his childhood, the city of Dublin where he was educated, and the history and culture of his native country. He arrived in the cosmopolitan city of Montreal and disco …

In spite of its disturbing implications, the impact of climate change on our physical environment can be difficult for us to understand or imagine. Moving from a memoir of a journey through an abundant yet fragile natural world to the daunting scientific evidence that climate change will lead to the degradation of nature and upheaval within society …

Winner of the W.O. Mitchell Award, the Wilfrid Eggleston Award for Non-Fiction, and the Alberta Readers' Choice Award

Following his mother's death in 2004, Tyler Trafford discovers an album of old letters and creased photographs that reveal a mother he never knew, a man he's never heard of, and a love affair doomed by class and circumstance. The let …

Would it be possible to compose a book that appears to be "about" its author, but is indirectly about something else, like identity or relationships or language? Maybe a book not written by a hero... but by many?

This was the challenge taken up by Kevin McPherson Eckhoff in his fourth book, their biography: an organism of relationships. This collabo …

Two years ago, Margaret left her Arctic home for the outsiders' school. Now she has returned and can barely contain her excitement as she rushes towards her waiting family -- but her mother stands still as a stone. This strange, skinny child, with her hair cropped short, can't be her daughter. "Not my girl!" she says angrily.

Margaret's years at sch …

Winner, City of Victoria Butler Book Prize

Finalist, Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction

Nominated for the BC National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction

Afflictions & Departures is a collection of first-person experiential essays. However, this is not the realm of traditional memoir—in addition to incidents and feelings recaptured from memory …

Written in his mother’s unique voice, John Leigh Walters pushes the boundaries of memoir in A Very Capable Life, the extraordinary journey of a seemingly ordinary woman.Zarah Petri was a child when her family left Hungary to establish a new life in Canada in the 1920s. With courage and innovation, Zarah and her family survived the Depression?even …

From 1919 to 1970, Olaf Hanson was a trapper, fur trader, prospector, game guardian, fisherman, and road blasting expert in northeastern Saskatchewan. He told his life story to popular Saskatchewan author A. L. Karras, who wrote this historical memoir in the 1980s. In an uncompromising, straightforward style, Karras and Hanson reveal the geography, …

Herbert Schulz gives us an inside''s account of the hardscrabble and often heartless prairie farm politics of the 1950s. The son of a CCF member, Schulz was an early organizer for the Manitoba Federation of Agriculture and later an executive in the Grandview Pool Elevator Association. His compelling memoir offers many humorous and poignant anecdote …

This book contains the collected memories of Lola Rozsa - of her life and service to her family, her church, and her community as she and her husband, Ted, made their way from the tiny towns of the Depression-era, dust bowl southern plains to the burgeoning oil fields of Alberta in 1949. As Ted struggled to build his first seismic company, Lola rai …

"The story of the individual always grips us - it is why biography remains so popular. But in Medicine and Duty we receive a double serving: the story of Medical Officer Captain Harold W. McGill coupled with the story of the many men who served in the 31st Battalion and what they together managed to achieve against such long odds." - Patrick Brenna …

Baroness Martha von Rosen, a Baltic German aristocrat, and her memories of the last year of the Second World War and the diary of her late husband, Baron Jürgen von Rosen, taken prisoner by the Allied forces during the war, together pay homage to the assertion that history can be a decidedly individual event.

Martha von Rosen has written a moving …

Here is the riveting account of two orphaned brothers whose unshakeable courage enable them to survive the still rarely told horrors of the Holocaust in Romania. As Jews were expelled from Bukovina and Bessarabia to Transnistria, young Joil and Avrum witnessed the cruel destruction of their own parents and many others. But underlying the author's u …

Through a unique combination of biography, memoir, and autobiography, Cherie Smith traces four generations of her immigrant family and, in doing so, charts the very course of Russian-Jewish immigration to the Canadian prairies over the last one hundred years.

The story begins in the shtetles of Poland and Latvia in the 1890s and follows an often wil …

What was romance like for Canadians a century ago? What qualities did marriageable men and women look for in prospective mates? How did they find suitable partners in difficult circumstances such as frontier isolation and parental disapproval, and, when they did, how did courtship proceed in the immediate post-Victorian era, when traditional romant …

When we think about women settlers on the Prairies, our notions tend to veer between the nostalgic image of the "cheerful helpmate" and the grim deprivation of the "reluctant immigrant." In this ground-breaking new study, Leigh Matthews shows how a critical approach to the life-writing of individual prairie women can broaden and deepen our understa …

During a time of two world wars and a sluggish world economy, many Northern Europeans left their homelands to build the American and Canadian West with dreams of abundance and new life. Spanning a period from the late 1800s to the mid-1900s, To Be a Cowboy recounts the dreams and realities of a father and a son.

Otto Christensen came to North Ameri …

Teréz Mózes was born in Romania in 1919 to a stable and loving family. Her idyllic life would eventually be shattered by the upheavals of the Second World War as the Nazis systematically undertook the destruction of the Jewish race.

Starting with the insidious and menacing anti-Jewish laws and continuing with resettlement into cramped ghettos and …

Originally written in the early 1970s, As I Remember Them is based on Jeanne-Elise Olsen's extraordinary recall of her childhood and youth spent in an isolated part of the Laurentians in the Lièvre River Valley in the early twentieth century.

Jeanne was the daughter of a Roman Catholic priest who was excommunicated from the Church because he marrie …

With Heart and Soul goes beyond the normal treatment of causes and consequences of immigration and focuses on the ways in which 'Old World' cultural traits were transformed and altered as immigrants encountered an urban, industrial (and, at times, hostile) new environment.

Based on forty-eight in-depth interviews with first-generation Italian immig …

"Her story adds to the growing literature related to individual life stories of Holocaust survivors. There is much we can learn from her book." - Benjamin Schlesinger, Professor Emeritus, University of Toronto

Until age seven, Olga Barsony Verrall lived an idyllic life in Szarvas, a small town in Hungary, surrounded by her doting, observant Jewish f …

"Looking for Country" refers to the thought process of animals bent on escape. A stampeding herd, or a spooked horse running away with its rider, may be described as "looking for country." It could also be applied to this memoir in another sense -- immigrants were looking for land, a piece of new country, and, perhaps, an escape from their old coun …

Almost unbelievable. You'll swear it's fiction.

"You haven't read a story like this one, even if your father was the kind of magnificent scoundrel you only find in Russian novels. Béchard is the rare writer who knows the secret to telling the true story." — Marlon James, author of A Brief History of Seven Killings

Growing up in rural British Colum …

Sometimes the life we have constructed needs to fall apart before we can begin the process of making something better. After his first marriage ended, Philip Lee found himself living with his younger brother in an old fisherman's house by the sea, trying to restore some order to the wreckage of his life. It was a dark year of rain-bucket showers, b …

Out-migration, driven by high unemployment and a floundering economy, has been a defining aspect of Newfoundland society for well over a century, and it reached new heights with the cod moratorium in 1992. This Newfoundland “diaspora” has had a profound impact on the province’s literature.

Many writers and scholars have referred to Newfoundlan …

How does the imagination entwine the shreds of memory of family, place and culture to root a self in the fluid experience of the present?

Daughter, wife, mother, teacher, writer and feminist academic, Helen M. Buss / Margaret Clarke has lived in many parts of Canada and writes from a life of multiple perspectives full of contradictory loyalties and …

Pioneers in life writing, Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), and Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein (1818 ), are now widely regarded as two of the leading writers of the Romantic period. They are both responsible for opening up new possibilities for women in genres traditionally dominated by men.

This volu …

“It’s an autobiography! If I tell you what’s in it you won’t read the book.” — Claire Drainie Taylor

Or would you? Maybe you’d be intrigued by the progression of a life begun as an unexceptional little girl born to a middle-class Jewish Canadian couple in a small prairie town who, at age sixteen, married a refined Englishman, and surv …

Shortlisted, Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Award

Warm, imaginative, and thoroughly original, this memoir intertwines the mysteries of trees with the defining moments in the life of novelist and essayist Theresa Kishkan. For Kishkan, trees are memory markers of life, and in this book she explores the presence of trees in nature, in culture and in her pers …

More than any other book that I can think of, Bronze Inside and Out puts a human face on Western art - indeed, all art. It invites us to ponder the very nature of the creative process.
From the foreword by Brian W. Dippie, University of Victoria

Bronze Inside and Out is a literary biography of sculptor Bob Scriver, written by his wife, Mary Strach …

A child’s face, a forgotten scent, or a distinctive flavour engages memory and inspires longing. Ken Haigh brings us tantalizingly close to his own vision of longing for a place, a people, a time, as he revisits those all-too-fleeting years as a young school teacher in the remote Himalayan village of Khaling, Bhutan. These experiences in an exoti …

Brian Evans blends memoir and history to draw a vivid picture of China and its cultural outreach over the past three decades. His historical and sociological insights as student, scholar, and administrator form an authentic commentary as he discusses China and the Cold War; the Cultural Revolution; the post-Mao transformation of China; Canada's rel …

A deep-seated questioning of her inherited religion resurfaces when Myrna Kostash chances upon the icon of St. Demetrius of Thessalonica. A historical, cultural and spiritual odyssey that begins in Edmonton, ranges around the Balkans, and plunges into a renewed vision of Byzantium in search of the Great Saint of the East delivers the author to an u …

Merging poetry and historical records, Zits masterfully (re)creates a poetic view of the Frog Lake Massacre of April 2, 1885. His collage and cut-up techniques challenge the histories penned by the event’s recorders and reflect upon the difficult and painful complexities of past and present. He weaves together voices of Métis and First Nations p …

Eagle Minds—a selection from the correspondence between the Canadian composer and scholar Istvan Anhalt and his American counterpart George Rochberg—is a splendid chronicle and a penetrating analysis of the swerving socio-cultural movements of a volatile half-century as observed by two highly gifted individuals.

Beginning in 1961 and spanning f …

Insightful and thought-provoking journal entries, from the 1950s to 2007, on the creative process, art, life, and province of renowned Canadian artist Christopher Pratt. Ordinary Things is laced with astute observations that summarize the artistic process, and the motivations and contemplations of not only an artist, but any man. It contains slices …

When poet and essayist Kenneth Sherman was diagnosed with cancer, he began keeping a notebook of observations that blossomed into this powerful memoir. With incisive and evocative language, Sherman presents a clear-eyed view of what the cancer patient feels and thinks. His narrative voice is personal but not confessional, practical but not cold, th …

As the South African War reached its grueling end in 1902, colonial interests at the highest levels of the British Empire hand-picked teachers from across the Commonwealth to teach the thousands of Boer children living in concentration camps. Highly educated, hard working, and often opinionated, E. Maud Graham joined the Canadian contingent of fort …

Joseph B. Martin traces his climb from a Mennonite farm in the village of Duchess, Alberta to Dean of Harvard Medical School in his memoir, Alfalfa to Ivy. Readers are rewarded with an intimate perspective on academic politics and health care in Canada and the U.S. that Martin is perfectly poised to critique. And it is the human story of Martin's j …

Conrad Kain is a titan amongst climbers in Canada and is well-known in mountaineering circles all over the world. His letters to Amelie Malek-a life-long friend-offer a candid view into the deepest thoughts of the Austrian mountain guide, and are a perfect complement to his autobiography, Where the Clouds Can Go. The 144 letters provide a unique an …

A peasant in peaked hat and blue shirt, with trousers rolled up high above his bare knees, crossed the road and silently examined the tricycle. “You have a good horse,” he then said; “it eats nothing.” —from An Italian Pilgrimage

The 1880s was an exhilarating time for cycling pioneers like Elizabeth and her husband Joseph. As boneshakers a …