Acting on self-assured determination and an ever-growing sense of adventure, Tori Holmes, a 21-year-old from Alberta, Canada, and Paul Gleeson, a 29-year-old financial advisor from Limerick, Ireland, embraced the dream of rowing a tiny boat across the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean in the 2005/06 Trans-Atlantic Race. Of course, neither of the young …

Elsa is a typical fifteen-year-old growing up in the early 1960s. Her world revolves around independence, boys, and being popular at school, despite growing concerns surrounding the Cuban missile crisis. In fact, this is Elsa's opportunity to let loose before the world blows up. Knee-deep in teenage angst, her mission is clear: get drunk for the fi …

The Red Coat Trail of southern Saskatchewan and southeastern Alberta runs near the route of the North West Mounted Police’s famous 1874 March West. Today, this lonely highway passes through a windswept land of ghostly abandoned towns. Johnnie Bachusky takes readers back to the heyday of these towns, which sprang up as settlers travelled west duri …

This is Robert James Challenger's fifth collection of beautifully illustrated, easy-to-read short stories that impart practical, moral lessons about life in today's world.

As in Aesop's fables and First Nations legends, animals, birds and insects are the ones who do the teaching. Mother Eagle helps her daughter overcome her sibling rivalry. An encou …

The sparsely populated southern Interior of British Columbia was rich in resources and ripe for settlement in the late 1800s. The agricultural lands of the Okanagan and Nicola valleys, and the precious metals and coal of the Kootenays, lay largely unused or undiscovered: the challenge was getting to these places.

Transportation was the key that ope …

In mid-July 1925, the SS Bayeskimo ran into heavy drift ice at the entrance to Hudson Strait. The ice carried her north, squeezing the steamer and testing the strength of her rivets. Helpless until the tide changed and the ice moved, the officers and crew could only watch and listen to the ship’s tormented groans. Slowly at first, trickles of fre …

These inspiring true stories illuminate the courage and wisdom of five 19th-century Native leaders and famous Métis who fought against impossible odds to preserve the culture and rights of their people. The visionary Cree leader Big Bear sought peace and a better life, only to be hunted mercilessly and imprisoned unjustly. Jerry Potts, the legenda …

The bond between cats and their people comes to the fore in these charming true stories. Cinders shows her young owner that she is more than her fears and insecurities. Mr. Morris's love of people makes him a winner as a therapy cat. A stray named Kitty finds a new owner and gives him a reason to live. Poignant and heartwarming, these stories will …

This fourth collection of short stories written by Robert James (Jim) Challenger combines the timeless appeal of Aesop's fables with the oral storytelling traditions of First Nations and other cultures. Each story stimulates conversation about the moral woven within.

Go along on Salmon's journey. Learn how Hermit Crab found a new home. Discover why …

Considered wise and powerful by the Inuit and other Native cultures, and celebrated in legend and literature, polar bears have become a charismatic symbol of animals threatened by climate change in the Arctic ecosystem. Yet for centuries, polar bears were demonized and slaughtered by adventurers who sailed the icy seas seeking wealth and glory. Th …

No vessel that sailed the Arctic seas has raised so much speculation or triggered imaginations as has the legendary Hudson's Bay Company ship Baychimo.

In the 1920s, Baychimo set up trading posts in eastern Canada, sailed on fur-trading expeditions to Siberia during the turbulent years of the Russian civil war and made dangerous annual voyages arou …

Dogs, horses and other animals have long shown courage, trust and loyalty to the people in their lives, but they also inspire selfless love in return. This touching collection of true stories shows how people and animals come together to overcome life's challenges and find hope for the future. National Service Dogs give autistic children the gift o …

In this latest collection of beautifully illustrated, easy-to-read fables, Robert James Challenger continues to teach children practical, moral lessons about life in today's complicated world. Owl shows Grandson that a problem will only go away when each person involved becomes part of the solution. Little Mallard Duck finds out the hard way that t …

Winner of the Aboriginal Children's Book of the Year Award, 2006 Anskohk Aboriginal Literature Festival and Book Awards

Kayâs is a young Cree man who is blessed with a Gift that makes him a talented hunter. He knows the ways of the Beings he hunts and can even talk with them in their own languages. But when he becomes proud and takes his abilities …

This collection of west-coast fables combines the approach of Aesop with the oral tradition of First Nations storytellers. Woodpecker shows how to be a true friend. Beaver demonstrates how to achieve dreams through hard work. Rainbow Trout finds that all things in nature have a purpose.

Parents, grandparents and teachers will embrace Robert James Ch …

This collection of short stories is based on traditional values important to us all—respect, cooperation and kindness. Robert James Challenger's illustrations and tales reveal a world of magical birds, fish and other wildlife, who teach readers lessons about life and the world.

Seal shows us why we should not let fear of failing stop us from tryi …

Jason Dorland is no stranger to competition. As a rower and coach, he’s seen his share of races won and lost. But after a devastating performance at the 1988 Olympics, Jason was overwhelmed by a sense of failure—and with small wonder. Winning at all costs, whereby the playing field is seen as a battlefield, is pretty much the industry standard …

Robert James Challenger uses the form of parables to teach children important values. The observations of Grandmother and other family members interpret the actions of nature's creatures in a variety of circumstances. His simple, direct stories reflect a philosophy widely embraced—respect for our environment and understanding of all creeds, races …

The characters from Susan Musgrave’s A Cargo of Orchids are back in this brilliantly engaging novel. Rainy, the Mexican-American woman, and Frenchy, the African-American, along with Musgrave’s narrator X have returned and convincingly insist their story is not done. Once inmates on death row, now reunited and hanging out at an old house in a BC …

Few writers have Harriet Richards’ understanding of childhood, and fewer still can evoke the never-lost child at the heart of our adult experience. Like her previous, critically-acclaimed books, this new collection is deft, comic, and poignant, but there is malice and tragedy at work in these stories — their gaiety and cool observation counterb …

In the 1870s, a teenage thief from New York, in search of his show business mother, gets collared by a keen-eyed cop from Canada’s newly created national police force — the North West Mounted Police. Following the encounter, he unwillingly finds himself hired on, with a cantankerous wagon master, to accompany the Mounties on their 1874 expediti …

The stories in Sandy Bonny’s collection take place in settings from the Arctic Circle to Alberta’s badlands, and from the waters of the Georgia Straight to the grasslands of the prairies, and the characters that we meet in these places will be oddly familiar or perhaps familiarly odd. There are children who live in the magical territory between …

A primitive story of transgression and transformation weaves its way through the centuries and cultures into the lives and conflicts and personal dramas of our own time. Seán Virgo traces its journey and the guises it takes on, reinventing itself as fable, fairy tale, ghost story, and fantasy — spellbinding entertainments that engage all the sam …

Part intellectual mystery and part spiritual adventure, A Year at River Mountain tells the story of an aging actor from Vancouver who has immersed himself in monastic life inChina and is now examining his past as an actor, husband,and father. As his Western consciousness grapples with Taoist philosophies and acupressure techniques, he assesses his …

Arrow through the Axes concludes the “Odyssey of a Slave” trilogy that began with the Red Maple–nominated Torn from Troy, retelling Homer’s Odyssey. The slave Alexi, now free of his Greek captors, infiltrates the Greek strongholds of the Bronze Age in search of his sister. In so doing he participates in the stories of Orestes, son of Agamem …

The Reddening Path is the story of Paméla who, adopted as an infant by Hannah & Fern, a Toronto lesbian couple, travels to Guatamala to search for her birth mother. Her quest uncovers a tangle of political and romantic intrigue as Paméla discovers her Mayan heritage and learns about the complexities of life in Guatemala. Resonating throughout is …

After suffering a crippling injury during a tour of Afghanistan, Michael has returned home to a Canadian veteran's care facility. The last thing he wanted was to spend his time with a twelve-year-old girl, but Halley, a spirited, physically disabled Pathfinder, is eager to earn her volunteer badge. The pair is at odds from the start, but they find …

This book collects some of Judith Thompson’s earlier, hard-to-find plays, including White Biting Dog, a poetic black comedy about a divorced lawyer who prepares to kill himself by jumping off the Bloor Street Viaduct—until he encounters a small dog who sets him on a different path; I Am Yours, a harrowing story about a group of characters on th …

Based on years of practical experience in small towns, Carrel argues for municipal autonomy—for turning what are now “colonies” of the federal and provincial orders of government into independent, mature, and fully democratic entities. For Carrel, the citizen is the sole legitimate source of political power, and the best tool for citizen empo …

Rachel, a young Jewish woman from a small town in Russia, has made an incredible journey. Forced to leave her homeland because of the anti-Semitic violence that killed her father, she made her way across land and sea to find refuge in Shanghai, China where she not only survived but managed to establish herself as a newspaper writer — no easy task …

Sisters Jennifer and Sarah were once part of a happy, stable family, but their idyllic life comes to an abrupt halt with the death of their mother. Unable to cope with his grief and the needs of his two young daughters, their father finds comfort in alcohol, gets fired from his job, and loses his grip on his family.

As twelve-year-old Jennifer appro …

In this unusual Holocaust memoir, Rhodea Shandler gives a woman's view of life under the Nazis in Holland. She begins by describing her early life in a closely knit Jewish family in northern Holland. There was anti-Semitism, she explains, but it was of a low level, and the Jews with their strong ties to community managed to live relatively normal l …

The gluttonous, jazz-loving character of Neil Connelly in John Lent’s So It Won’t Go Away can never get enough out of life, no matter how much he over-indulges his desires: “Drinking, smoking, sex: a man’s hands twittering, eyes bugged out in a desperate longing to be held, fondled, stuffed, stroked. Guzzling and inhaling things in a big gr …

Black Teeth is a compelling collection of linked stories that explore growing up in Winnipeg's famously multicultural North End through its 1960s Golden Age and beyond, examining the strange dual legacy of that experience. While urban ethnic mixes and immigrant populations shift over time and place, every city has its foreign part, that transition …

Breathe on four. Define your terms. What is this desire?

Attuned to a body in motion, Swim pulls the reader beneath the logic of prose, into the eroticism of language itself. The arcing rhythm of a body breathing - a woman marking her birth as she swims in a pool - sustains the unique and hypnotic language that becomes the medium through which this …

Finalist for a 2014 Alberta Literary Award

Between 1870 and 1970, 26 million Italians left their homeland and travelled to places like Canada, Australia and the United States, in search of work. Many of them never returned to Italy. Against this historic backdrop comes the story of Rosina, a Calabrian matriarch, who worked as a midwife in an area wh …

Over the last 50 years, the struggles to achieve equity in sport have become central to the feminist mission. This book contains an inspiring collection of stories from the women on the front lines: athletes, coaches, educators, and activists for women's sport, who have done so much to foster change. Many of the women profiled here reflect on their …

Women on Ice is the first book to focus upon the vibrant world of women's ice hockey in western Canada during the First World War and through the 1920s. The Vancouver Amazons were one of the most important teams during this perod. Their championship laurels and their association with hockey's famous Patrick brothers distinguish the Amazons from oth …

This bilingual edition is the first English translation of Aquin's ground-breaking novella. Alone in exotic Naples, an impassioned François anticipates the arrival of girlfriend Hélène. Uncertainty and impatience warp his waiting into an obsessive mélange of recollection and speculation. His interior monologue threads its way through a diso …

In this fascinating historical novel, twelve-year-old Jolene travels back in time to the year 1903 and finds herself in the coal mining town of Frank on the eve of Canada's deadliest rockslide. Disguised as a boy, Jolene must face the wrath of an impatient teacher, challenge her ability as a gymnast, and disentangle herself from an embarrassing lov …

It’s 1914. Sixteen year old Sophie Pritchard, orphaned two years earlier by the sinking of the SS Titanic, is about to begin a new life in the unfamiliar world of British India. For Sophie, still devastated by her parents’ death, India proves a dangerously unsettling environment. Are her terrifying experiences in Kali’s temple and the Park St …

Shimmerdogs is the story of young Lester B. Hopkins — Mike to almost everyone except his mother, Master Corporal Alice Mackelwain. He is just a boy trying to make sense of his life, which is becoming more complicated by the world of his absent soldiering mother. Mike is very worried about his mother’s safety while she is in Bosnia. He, like his …

In the heady days of the 1920s Jazz Age, people went to the movies almost every day, living vicariously through their heroes: Valentino, Garbo, Fairbanks, and Pickford. But comedians were the biggest draw, and broad slapstick the order of the day, with one very significant exception. Standing beside Keaton and Chaplin in popularity and prowess was …

Iconoclast David F. Noble traces the evolution and eclipse of the biblical mythology of the Promised Land, the foundational story of Western Culture. Part impassioned manifesto, part masterful survey of opposed philosophical and economic schools, Beyond the Promised Land brings into focus the twisted template of the Western imagination and its fait …

“Nothing is going to go wrong.” -Mike Harris, 2001

Privatization of power soon became one of the biggest political disasters in Ontario history. Hydro reveals a train wreck that was decades in the making. First there was blind faith in the nuclear option, steeped in ecological arrogance. Then came the promise of marketplace magic.

Jamie Swift and …

I Don't Know How To Behave combines the true story of Canadian daredevil and stunt driver Ken Carter (1938-1983) with imagined biographical elements from the lives of Canadian film director Bruce Mcdonald and Canadian poet Gillian Sze. Along the way, this quintessential Canadian story crashes head first into many related things, from screenplay the …

On the morning of June 13, 1886, a rogue wind fanned the flames of a small clearing fire—and within five hours, the newly incorporated city of Vancouver, British Columbia, had been reduced to smoldering ash. Vancouver is Ashes: The Great Fire of 1886 is the first detailed exploration of what happened on that pivotal, yet seldom revisited day in t …

Speaking a language we understand, Rona Shaffran's poems tell the story of remarkable things that can happen in a broken relationship. These poems inhabit the sharp edges and rich depths of a union too long untended. Ignite begins in wintry suburbia with a man and woman who have lost emotional and physical connection. A magic-realist plunge into th …

This debut short-story collection showcases Mary Hagey's uncanny ability to capture the essence of being human. These richly satisfying stories, told with wry humour, intelligence, and verve take us into fictional territory that is at once utterly original and as real as the world around us. These are people we know.

Some of them might have fared be …

How do you find a bully who lurks on the Internet and lashes out at helpless victims? Intrepid kid detectives Marty, Remi, and Trina must answer that question if they’re to stop a cyber bully targeting their classmates.

In their toughest case yet, the sleuths must follow the electronic trail to their enemy, but the cyber bully outsmarts them at ev …