Strongman
This compelling biography of Doug Hepburn, the weightlifter who won gold for Canada in Stockholm in 1953 and at the British Empire Games in Vancouver in 1954, delivers fascinating, first-hand information about an unusual Vancouver athlete and the sporting world of the 1950s and 1960s. In this plain-spoken and moving biography of a strength legend, …
User Error
User Error explodes the myth of computer technology as juggernaut. Multimedia educator Ellen Rose shows that there is no bandwagon, no out-of-control dynamo, no titanic conspiracy to overwhelm us. Instead, there is our own desire to join the fraternity of users, a fraternity that confers legitimacy and power on those who enter the brave new world. …
Deep Too
Employing a sort of leaping or mosaic structure and incorporating e-mails re penis-enlargement, questionable limericks, jokes, graffiti and a photo of a "penis latte," along with personal anecdotes and probes of books and films, Deep Too is a book of non-fiction stories. It is a funny and sometimes biting book about the phenomenon of male strut and …
A Work in Progress
Writer Danny Bayle’s life is in shambles. His true love has left him and his grandfather—the last and most important influence in his life—has just passed away. Danny has spent the last few months languishing, unable to write a single word, but at the urging of a friend ventures out into the world in an attempt to jumpstart a new life, befrie …
Saying When
People often recognize that their drinking is causing problems in their lives long before they are ready to seek help. Knowing that there is a problem can be a good first step to cutting back or quitting drinking, but it can be hard to know what further steps to take to make changes and stick to them.
Saying When presents a step-by-step program to h …
South of Elfrida
The nature of relationships is skilfully illuminated in this collection of stories by award-winning author Holley Rubinsky. South of Elfrida delves into the lives of those coming face to face with personal truths that require resilience, humour and the ability to change.
With a clear eye for the complexities of the human heart, Rubinsky’s stories …
Eat Your Heart Out
With unsentimental prose and ironic dialogue, Katie Boland brings to life a variety of characters who all have one thing in common—a need for something more. A literary debut by a refreshing new voice in fiction, the stories in Eat Your Heart Out are about the haunted and heartbroken, about dreamers, losers and love-lost souls. From a sixteen-yea …
How I Won the War for the Allies
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-bo …
Permeable Border
From the colonial era of waterborne transport, through nineteenth-century changes in transportation and communication, to globalization, the history of the Great Lakes Basin has been shaped by the people, goods, and capital crossing and recrossing the U.S.-Canadian border.
During the past three centuries, the region has been buffeted by efforts to …
God's Autobio
The short stories in God's Autobio, Rolli’s debut collection, are impossible, quite probable, and everything in between. There’s a story about a man with a ridiculously huge coupon; about an elderly woman who befriends a frenzied robotic chimpanzee; an overzealous, if increasingly masochistic butler; plus twenty-three other surreal, sublime, an …
Escape and Other Stories
From the author of the novels Love on the Killing Floor and Dragging the River, Trevor Clark’s new collection of stories covers broad territory, from an addict’s confessions to the corruption of academia, in such diverse locales as Jamaica and the UK. The subtle nuances of knifings, the unforeseen rise of Islamic terrorists, the familial kidnap …
Flyways
Devin Krukoff’s delicate balancing of hyperbole and psychological realism is the book’s greatest achievement. Flyways is thematically reminiscent of Zsuzsi Gartner’s All the Anxious Girls on Earth, but without the moral didacticism. While Krukoff’s stories share Gartner’s sense of humour, they elicit the reader’s sympathy rather than co …
You Fancy Yourself
When Elsa and her family move from Iceland to Scotland, she is filled with uncontrollable joy over the new adventure she is about to begin. With her infectious energy and love for the dramatic, Elsa stands out both in her community and within her classroom, but this exuberance also targets her as an outcast. Only through the faith of a new friend a …
Proudflesh
In these stories, readers will not find heartwarming sentimentality, but mature literary prose with surprising twists and indeterminate endings, and women of intense substance and spirit. P. J. Worrell understands girls who dream of being wives and mothers in safe cozy homes, then find out that trying hard to secure that life does not necessarily m …
Gold Dust On His Shirt
Gold Dust on His Shirt is an evocative telling of the experience of a Scandinavian immigrant family of hard-rock miners at the turn of the century and up to World War II. Based on fascinating historical research, these are tales of arriving in ‘Amerika,’ blasting the Grand Trunk Pacific railway, work in the mines, and domestic life and labour …
Ticknor
Ticknor is the first novel by Sheila Heti, the author of the acclaimed story collection The Middle Stories and, with Misha Glouberman, the essay collection The Chairs are Where the People Go.
George Ticknor is trying to reconcile his own failure with the success of his boyhood friend, the famous American historian William Prescott. Ticknor's life h …
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 …
The 2012 Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology
The best books of poetry published in English internationally and in Canada are honoured each year with the $65,000 Griffin Poetry Prize, one of the world's most prestigious and valuable literary awards. Since 2001 this annual prize has acted as a tremendous spur to interest in and recognition of poetry, focusing worldwide attention on the formidab …
Ireland's Eye
On August 22, 1922, near Macroom, County Cork, a single bullet from an unknown gunman killed Michael Collins, the Commander-in-Chief of the Irish Free State Army. The day Collins was buried, businesses across Dublin shut down as thousands lined the streets to pay their respects. And on that day, Michael Lyons, a cooper from the Guinness factory tak …
The Hockey Sweater and Other Stories
The Hockey Sweater, the title story in this 20-story collection, has become an enduring classic: a Quebec boy and Habs fan is shipped a Toronto Maple Leafs sweater by mistake. It encapsulates everything you need to understand French and English Canada, told with humour and love. This edition features a new introduction.
Finlay's River
Adventures on wild waters
In Finlay's River, R. M. Patterson, whose style was described by noted author Bruce Hutchison as a a mixture between Thoreau and Jack London, tells the story of his 1949 trip up this wild river in remote northern British Columbia. Patterson uses his own journey as a framework to recount the adventures of explorers who went …
The Carbon Cycle
In 2006 “outdoor philosopher” Kate Rawles cycled 4553 miles from Texas to Alaska, following the spine of the Rocky Mountains as closely as possible. Cycling across unforgiving but starkly beautiful landscapes in both the United States and Canada – deserts, high mountain passes, glaciers and eventually down to the sea – she encountered bears …
Technology and Sustainability
Provocative, passionate and populist, RMB Manifestos are short and concise non-fiction books of literary, critical, and cultural studies.
The developed world is increasingly obsessed with two things: electronic gadgets and our changing climate. We stand in open-mouthed awe of our technological achievements while dejectedly shrugging our shoulders at …
A Journey to the Northern Ocean
Widely recognized as a classic of northern-exploration literature, A Journey to the Northern Ocean is Samuel Hearne's story of his three-year trek to seek a trade route across the Barrens in the Northwest Territories. Hearne was a superb reporter, from his anguished description of the massacre of helpless Eskimos by his Indian companions to his met …
In the Flesh
Living is a process of continuous transformation: we have been embryos, children, adolescents, thin, fat, sick, better again. And as humans, we are always at odds with at least one part of our bodies. Have we inherited the family nose? Is there nothing to be done for our finicky stomach or our limp hair?
In the Flesh is an intelligent, witty, and pr …
Freddy's War
In 1941, a young man imagines thrilling battles and heroic acts when he lies about his age and joins the army. “Assigned to the Winnipeg Grenadiers, part of the Canadian army in Hong Kong, Freddy McKee becomes a prisoner of war six weeks after arriving in Hong Kong.
Five years pass and Freddy finally returns home from the war, but three women—J …
Beer Quest West
It’s no secret that Canadians love beer, and in the western provinces, the large number of successful microbreweries continues to prove that distinct beer—high-quality beer—is important to our national pint-lovers. Beer Quest West is for homebrewers and beer aficionados alike: this is your guide to the best of the west.
Alberta and British Co …
I Am Full Moon
In this lyrical memoir, Lily Hoy Price writes with moving detail about her childhood and adolescence in a large Chinese Canadian family in the Cariboo country of northern British Columbia. The ninth daughter in a family of 12 children, Lily is an observant child who tucks away every image of life in rugged Quesnel during the 1930s for one unforgett …
Afterall
At a dinner party, Beth — thirty-six, single, and working as much overtime as she can get her hands on — impulsively announces that she's going to spend a night on Vancouver's mean streets in commiseration of the homeless. Unexpectedly, her hosts' son Mason — nine years old, small for his age, intense, intellectual and so shy he can't speak i …
All My Sins
Ben Dunn has not been trafficking marijuana to his high school students. He has, however, been intimate with one, which is probably why the authorities come looking for him one afternoon. After a night spent in the drunk-tank, Ben commissions his friend’s help in planning a revenge-plot against the fellow teacher he blames for his forced removal …
A Century of Grant MacEwan
August 12, 2002 would have marked the 100th birthday of one of Western Canada's most beloved, exemplary, idiosyncratic and admired citizens, the Hon. J.W. Grant MacEwan. A Century of Grant MacEwan: Selected Writings is published to mark the centenary of the author's birth, and showcases the writing achievements of this remarkable man. From his firs …
Hideout Hotel
In a mining town edging the Australian Nullarbor, Gina sits at the bar and devotes herself to the heart of what she’s trying to escape. After finishing a grueling cross-Canada tour, Dana, an alt-rock musician, flees to the Yukon to avoid her band’s rising fame and risks sabotaging it all. In a small West Coast fishing town, a boat-dwelling moth …
Old Bones
Resting on what was left of the bench was something else, lighter in shade than the background, round, about the size of a cabbage. There were two large holes close together, a smaller pair below, then two rows of wedge-shaped objects. The pattern suddenly coalesced: in atavistic and chilling familiarity . . .
In a remote British Columbia lake, an …
The Columbia River Treaty
Provocative, passionate and populist, RMB Manifestos are short and concise non-fiction books of literary, critical, and cultural studies.
The Columbia River Treaty ratification in 1964 created the largest hydropower project in North America, with additional emphasis on flood protection for the United States. As the treaty approaches its 60th anniver …
The Real Thing
The Real Thing is the first official biography of Ian McTaggart Cowan (1910–2010), the “father of Canadian ecology.” Authorized by his family and with the research support and participation of the University of Victoria Libraries, Briony Penn provides an unprecedented and accessible window into the story of this remarkable naturalist. From hi …
The Promise
It was 1862 and the Cariboo Gold Rush was in full swing. Sophia Cameron, the Beauty of Barkerville, lay dying of typhoid when her husband, John Cariboo Cameron, made one last promise to his fading young wife. The Promise is a compelling story of a great love and an epic struggle to honour a dying wife's final request: to take her body home to easte …
Stella
A wealthy madam who was known from San Francisco to Victoria in the early part of the 20th century, Stella Carroll was glamorous, worldly and determined to succeed. Her bordellos were fashionably decorated and patronized by the affluent and the powerful; she offered the best of everything—fine food and wine, cigars, entertainment and, of course, …
Scoundrels and Saloons
From the days of the fur trade, one constant thread weaves its way through the tumultuous history of frontier British Columbia, Washington and Oregon—the war over liquor. Between 1840 and 1917, the whisky wars of the west coast were fought by historical heavyweights, including Matthew Baillie Begbie (the “Hanging Judge”) and Wyatt Earp, and a …
The Tinsmith
Finalist for the 2012 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize
During the bloodiest single-day battle in American history, Anson Baird, a surgeon for the Union Army, is on the front line tending to the wounded. As the number of casualties rises, a mysterious soldier named John comes to Anson's aid. Deeply affected by the man's selfless actions, Anson soo …
We Don't Listen to Them
Sean Johnston will leave readers smiling at the acrobatics of his words and techniques in this eagerly anticipated second short story collection after the Relit award winning A Day Does Not Go By. Several stories, such as “We Don’t Celebrate That”, explore the difficulty of survival in an increasingly indifferent political reality, while othe …
Flavours of the West Coast
The West Coast has an abundance of produce and natural food resources, and some of the most talented and influential chefs in the world. In this colourful cookbook, British Columbia's top restaurateurs, chefs, and foodies share signature dishes that will inspire cooks everywhere. Meet the province's well-known and up-and-coming culinary stars as th …
All the Dirt
New farmers, experienced growers, budding environmentalists, and fans of natural, organic produce alike are sure to love All the Dirt. Filled with beautiful photographs and covering a wide variety of topics, from agrofuels and food sovereignty to practical tips about specific tools, All the Dirt is the must-read how-to book about small-scale organi …
The Spencer Mansion
Built in 1889 and now home to the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, the Spencer Mansion is a magnificent building with a rich and layered history. With detailed research, historian and author Robert Ratcliffe Taylor describes the original appearance of the house, designed by William Ridgway Wilson for Alexander Green and his family, as well as its i …
Teaching Crowds
Within the rapidly expanding field of educational technology, learners and educators must confront a seemingly overwhelming selection of tools designed to deliver and facilitate both online and blended learning. Many of these tools assume that learning is configured and delivered in closed contexts, through learning management systems (LMS). Howeve …
Rose's Run
After losing her job and being left by her rock musician husband, Rose Okanese, a single mother of two feisty girls, resolves to claim some self-respect. She decides the fastest way to do that is to run the reserve’s annual marathon, but her training is sidetracked when she must do battle with an ancient demon. With a cast of unusual characters, …
The Gravitational Pull of Bernice Trimble
Iris Trimble is trying to hold it all together. She may very well fly off the face of the earth if she doesn't hang on to the kitchen counter. At least that's how she feels after her mother, Bernice, a lively, recently widowed fifty-nine-year-old breaks the news that she has Alzheimer's. In an effort to cope with the stress, Iris makes her mother's …
Little One and Other Plays
A chilling psychological thriller, Little One is the haunting story of adopted siblings Aaron and Claire—one the definition of normal, the other deeply disturbed and unpredictable—and the strange lives of their neighbours, a man and his mail-order bride.
In Other People’s Children, wealthy young power couple Ben and Ilana hire Sati, a live-in …
Cruelties
From the acclaimed author of Following the Summer and Affairs of Art come these stories that convey the betrayal that accompanies every love story, seek to dispel all illusion, and recommend malice as state of grace. In the end vengeance emerges -- hot, velvety, coursing with passion and blood, and, surprisingly, capable of forging the most lasting …
John Rae's Arctic Correspondence, 1844-1855
Although Arctic explorer and Hudson Bay Company surveyor John Rae (1813–1893) travelled and recorded the final uncharted sections of the Northwest Passage, he is best known for his controversial discovery of the fate of the lost Franklin Expedition of 1845. Based on evidence given to him by local Inuit, Rae determined that Franklin’s crew had r …