A gutsy, no-holds-barred, coming-of-age story.

In the Point St. Charles of the author’s childhood people move for one of two reasons: their apartment is on fire, or the rent is due. Starting in 1968, eight-year-old Kathy Dobson shares her early years growing up in Point St. Charles, an industrial slum in Montreal (now in the process of gentrificat …

At the start of the Second World War, Poland was invaded by both the German and the Soviet armies. The country was unable to withstand the assaults and thousands of Polish soldiers and civilians were shipped to labour camps and prisons, where starvation, disease, and mistreatment were their daily expectations. With the signing of an amnesty between …

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 …

"Heartbreaking and important… brings into dramatic focus why we need reconciliation." - James Daschuk, author of Clearing the Plains This memoir offers a courageous and intimate chronicle of life in a residential school. Now a retired fisherman and trapper, the author was one of an estimated 150,000 First Nations, Inuit, and Metis children who we …

Finding Me in France is a chronicle of the delights and deprecations of making a dream come true. Landing in a small village in Burgundy with only her expectations of adventure to guide her, she details the unaccountable stumbling blocks and the unforeseen joys of her often awkward, frequently perplexing, always entertaining journey of discovery. I …

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 …

In 1954, when Florence Kaefer was just nineteen, she accepted a job as a teacher at Norway House Indian Residential School of Manitoba. Not fully aware of the difficult conditions the students were enduring, Florence and her fellow teachers nurtured a school full of lonely and homesick young children.

Edward was only five when he was brought to the …

In 1974 Lorne Dufour moved to Alkali Lake Reserve, a Shuswap community near Williams Lake in British Columbia, to help reopen the local elementary school. Like many First Nation communities across Canada, Alkali Lake had been ravaged by decades of residential schools and forced religion. Colonialism had robbed them of their language and culture and …

This Holocaust memoir crosses generations. In I Have My Mother's Eyes, Barbara Ruth Bluman chronicles her mother's dramatic journey from Nazi-occupied Poland to western British Columbia, where her legacy lives on. Bluman sets an urgent and intimate tone as she follows Zosia Hoffenberg from her genteel upbringing in Warsaw through the shock of the b …

This collection of over thirty essays by both well-known and emerging writers explores what it means to “be at home” on Canada’s West Coast. Here the rainforest and the wild, stormy cost dominate one’s sense of identity, a humbling perspective shared in memoirs by individuals who come to see themselves as part of a larger ecological communi …

Growing up Jewish in the little town, or shtetl, of Eisiskes near the Polish-Lithuanian border, Leon Kahn experienced a peaceful childhood until September 1, 1939 when Hitler’s forces attacked Poland. Only sixteen years of age, Kahn watched as the women and children of his community were herded into a gravel pit and murdered.Realizing that to sta …

At the beginning of the Nazi period, 25,000 Jewish people lived in Tarnow, Poland. By the end of the Second World War, nine remained. Like Anne Frank, Israel Unger and his family hid for two years in an attic crawl space. Against all odds, they emerged alive. Now, after decades of silence, here is Israel’s “unwritten diary.”
Nine people liv …

Mapping Canada’s Music is a selection of writings by the late Canadian music librarian and historian Helmut Kallmann (1922–2012). Most of the essays deal with aspects of Canadian music, but some are also autobiographical, including one written during retirement in which Kallmann recalls growing up in a middle-class Jewish family in 1930s Berli …

Since the early 1990s, tens of thousands of memoirs by celebrities and unknown people have been published, sold, and read by millions of American readers. The memoir boom, as the explosion of memoirs on the market has come to be called, has been welcomed, vilified, and dismissed in the popular press. But is there really a boom in memoir production …

Health is a gendered concept in Western cultures. Customarily it is associated with strength in men and beauty in women. This gendered concept was transmitted through visual representations of the ideal female and male bodies, and ubiquitous media images resulted in the absorption of universal standards of beauty and health and generalized desires …

“Where do you come from?”
When Vijay Agnew first immigrated to Canada people would often ask her “Where do you come from?” She thought it a simple, straightforward question, and would answer in the same simple, straightforward manner, by telling them where she had been born and where she grew up.
But over the years she learned that many …

In the 1950s, Anne Innis Dagg was a young zoologist with a lifelong love of giraffe and a dream to study them in Africa. Based on extensive journals and letters home, Pursuing Giraffe vividly chronicles the realization of that dream and the year that she spent studying and documenting giraffe behaviour. Dagg was one of the first zoologists to stud …

Canadian Graphic: Picturing Life Narratives presents critical essays on contemporary Canadian cartoonists working in graphic life narrative, from confession to memoir to biography. The contributors draw on literary theory, visual studies, and cultural history to show how Canadian cartoonists have become so prominent in the international market for …

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 Newfoundl …

Long before she became the renowned author of the best-selling Schmecks cookbooks, an award-winning journalist for magazines such as Macleans, and a creative non-fiction mentor, Edna Staebler was a writer of a different sort. Staebler began serious diary writing at the age of sixteen and continued to write for over eighty years. Must Write: Edna S …

Women’s letters and memoirs were until recently considered to have little historical significance. Many of these materials have disappeared or remain unarchived, often dismissed as ephemera and relegated to basements, attics, closets, and, increasingly, cyberspace rather than public institutions. This collection showcases the range of critical d …

“Dour Scot” is the wrong description for David Caldow, who leads readers on a romp from the early twentieth century to the present, from an insular Scottish village to modern-day, multicultural British Columbia, from boyhood to old age. Throughout the tour he shares decades of laughter, tears, fears, and growth.
In 1910, the certain path of D …

In Canadian universities in the early 1960s, no courses were offered on Hinduism, Buddhism, or Islam. Only the study of Christianity was available, usually in a theology program in a church college or seminary. Today almost every university in North America has a religious studies department that offers courses on Western and Eastern religions as …

Dead Woman Pickney chronicles life stories of growing up in Jamaica from 1943 to 1965 and contains both personal experience and history, told with stridency and humour. The author’s coming of age parallels the political stages of Jamaica’s moving from the richest Crown colony of Great Britain to an independent nation within the British Commonwe …

Alequiers is the story of a one–hundred–year–old log house on the banks of the Highwood River in Southern Alberta, with particular emphasis on the time that author Mike Schintz and his family spent there. The book details what little is known about Alexander McQueen Weir, the original settler on the site and goes on to describe the changes in …

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 …

Jeffery Williams offers a vivid retelling of his childhood in Calgary during the depression, followed by the outbreak of war and his enthusiastic enrolment in the Canadian Army. First sent to England in 1939, eager and untrained, Williams went on to a thirty-three year career, experiencing wars in Europe and Korea, and serving inCanada, Germany, th …

Between these covers, you will read about the life of an individual—Mark MacGuigan—who dedicated his life to bettering Canada. From his fascination with the law to his interest in politics and international affairs, Mark made a lasting impact on virtually every area to which he turned his efforts . . . from the forward by Paul Martin

Mark MacGu …

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 …

“My name is Weetaltuk; Eddy Weetaltuk. My Eskimo tag name is E9-422.” So begins From the Tundra to the Trenches. Weetaltuk means “innocent eyes” in Inuktitut, but to the Canadian government, he was known as E9-422: E for Eskimo, 9 for his community, 422 to identify Eddy.

In 1951, Eddy decided to leave James Bay. Because Inuit weren’t allo …

In his engaging memoirs, One Version of the Facts: My Life in the Ivory Tower, Dr. Henry Duckworth takes readers from his student days in Winnipeg and Chicago in the 1930s to his time as president of the University of Winnipeg (1971–1981) and chancellor of the University of Manitoba. An accomplished physicist, he wrote the first definitive text i …

Life Among the Qallunaat is the story of Mini Aodla Freeman’s experiences growing up in the Inuit communities of James Bay and her journey in the 1950s from her home to the strange land and stranger customs of the Qallunaat, those living south of the Arctic. Her extraordinary story, sometimes humourous and sometimes heartbreaking, illustrates an …

Graham McInnes was one of many talented young people recruited by the charismatic John Grierson to build the National Film Board of Canada during the heady days of WWII. McInnes’s memoir of these “days of high excitement” is an insider’s look at the NFB from 1939 to 1945, a vivid “origin” story of Canada’s emerging world-class film st …

A social and economic history of one of the oldest Ukrainian settlements in Western Canada. Established in 1896, the Stuartburn colony was one of the earliest Ukrainian settlements in western Canada. Based on an analysis of government records, pioneer memoirs, and the Ukrainian and English language press, Community and Frontier is a detailed examin …

My Parents: Memoirs of New World Icelanders is a collection of essays written by second-generation Icelandic immigrants in North America, describing the lives of their parents. Originally collected in 1956 by Dr. Finnbogi Gumundsson, the first Chair of Icelandic at the University of Manitoba, seven of the fourteen memoirs are translated here from I …

A compelling, harrowing, but ultimately uplifting story of resilience and self-discovery.

A Two-Spirit Journey is Ma-Nee Chacaby’s extraordinary account of her life as an Ojibwa-Cree lesbian. From her early, often harrowing memories of life and abuse in a remote Ojibwa community riven by poverty and alcoholism, Chacaby’s story is one of endurin …

Lorna Drew thought her partner was carrying his absent-minded professor status too far, until, two years ago, he was diagnosed with Alzheimer Disease. A thoughtful memoir and a wide-ranging handbook, Different Minds is an illuminating side-by-side account of life with Alzheimer Disease. Prepared with the assistance of the Alzheimer Society of New B …

Home is like a leaf on a tree: other people, other homes, are the other leaves. They live beneath the same sky, share the same memories, survive the same storms.

But one leaf is a solitude.

After twenty-five years on a New Brunswick farm, award-winning Canadian author Beth Powning came to understand the land she calls home. Now, almost twenty years a …

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 …

There is a dreamlike quality to many of the stories in this new collection from Wayne Curtis. In Wild Apples, he returns to familiar themes of love and longing, and the push-pull emotions which inevitably accompany any attempt to break free of the ties that bind. Simple pleasures abound in these evocative stories, be it fishing on the river, gather …

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 …

On September 2, 1998, a fire in the cockpit sent Swissair Flight 111 plunging into the sea off Peggy's Cove, Nova Scotia. All 229 men, women and children on board perished, including Ivy Bannister's sister, Patty. Set in Dublin, New York and the South Shore of Nova Scotia, Blunt Trauma is the true story of how one family's life was ravaged by the t …

"On a Rrrroll! You may not be familiar with Ron Buist, but you know his handiwork." — The Ottawa Citizen.

Tales from Under the Rim is a behind-the-scenes look at a simple business that became a Canadian icon. Tales from Under the Rim chronicles the rise of Tim Hortons, from its humble beginnings to a national institution. The recipe was simple: it …

Her weakest moment spawned a crusade for change. Julie Devaney takes on a journey through the health care system as she is diagnosed and treated for ulcerative colitis. In and out of emergency rooms in Vancouver and Toronto, she's poked, prodded, and abandoned to a closet at one point, bearing the helplessness and indignities of a system that seems …

When Kate Barlow was a little girl, she moved with her mother and her older sisters to a ramshackle English mansion. They were not alone on the once-grand estate, surrounded as they were by twenty eccentric, elderly women, one of whom was her grandmother...or was she?

This remarkable memoir is the true story of life inside "The A," the infamous Agap …

Born in 1889, Gertrude Harding spent a boistrous childhood on a Welsford, New Brunswick, farm. She travelled to Hawaii to live with her sister, and, when her sister moved to London in 1912, Harding went with her. One day, from the top of a London bus, she saw a parade of women carrying large white posters. Attended by a policeman, they walked in si …

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 …

My Name Is Lola, 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, L …

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 …

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 Looking Back: Canadian Women's Prairie Memoirs and Intersections of Culture, History, and Identity, Leigh Matthews shows how a critical approach to the life-wri …