Georg Tintner is best known to music lovers for his stunning interpretations of Bruckner’s symphonies he recorded on Naxos in the 1990s.

The first Jewish member of the Vienna Boys’ Choir, a composer at six, and a conductor at nineteen, Georg Tintner was one of the bright young musicians in Vienna, notwithstanding the city’s pervasive anti-S …

In this deeply moving and elegantly written book, Halfdan W. Freihow takes Gabriel, his young autistic son, on a journey through the full spectrum of human experience. With great love, profound tenderness, and gentle wit, Freihow captures Gabriel's triumphs and disappointments, his joy and frustration, while struggling to help him make sense of a w …

In these Red Cross memoirs, thirty women tell their stories of volunteer work with the Canadian Red Cross Corps in overseas postings during World War Two and the Korean War. These dramatic narratives take us across oceans infested with enemy submarines to witness Canadian women on duty in the U.K., in Europe and in Asia. Laced with humour and fille …

In the early 1980s, Yvonne Maximchuk, a single mother of two, was living in Whiterock, BC, and making a living as a working artist and art instructor. Then she fell in love with Albert, a crab fisherman who fished the waters of Boundary Bay. Drawn to his seemingly idyllic life and her desire for connection with the natural world, Yvonne and her chi …

Joshua Key's critically acclaimed memoir, The Deserter's Tale, is the first account from a soldier who deserted from the war in Iraq, and a vivid and damning indictment of how the war is being waged.

In spring 2003, young Oklahoman Joshua Key was sent to Ramadi as part of a combat engineer company with the U.S. military. The war he found himself par …

Finalist, ReLit Award

Amazon.ca's 50 Essential Canadian Books selection

First published in 1997 to much critical acclaim, Salvage King, Ya! is a novel firmly rooted in Canada’s favourite national pastime—hockey. Critics have called Salvage King, Ya! “the great Canadian novel,” and a “postmodern Canadian classic.” Drinkwater, Jarman’s n …

Finalist, Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize (BC Book Prizes)

Finalist, City of Vancouver Book Prize

Long listed for CBC Canada Reads 2015

The Door Is Open is a compassionate, reflective, and informative memoir about three-and-a-half years spent volunteering at a skid row drop-in centre in Vancouver’s downtown eastside. In an area most renowned for its …

Winner, SFU Writer's Studio's First Book Competition (2010)

Winner, Canadian Authors Association Exporting Alberta Award (2011)

Unmarried and pregnant in 1968 Winnipeg, teenager Myrl Coulter found herself at a loss. Unable (and perhaps unwilling) to support her child, Myrl’s parents forced her to give the baby up for adoption. After being sent to a …

Best Books of 2005, Ottawa Xpress

Writer's Trust of Canada's "Warm Weather Reads Recommended by Writers" list (recommended by Robert Hough)

Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer is equal parts literary memoir, advice for the emerging writer, and reckless tirade. Ross has been active in the Canadian literary underground for a quarter of a century: he …

Since women started working in the trades in the 1970s, very little has been published about their experiences. In this provocative and important book, Kate Braid tells the story of how she became a carpenter in the face of skepticism and discouragement.

In 1977 when Braid was broke and out of work, her male friends encouraged her to apply as a labo …

In 1964, Patricia MacKay immigrated to Canada from England in search of the wild-open lands and cowboy culture that captivated her as a child. In the 1960s, the Wild West was still alive and kicking in the Cariboo-Chilcotin, although it had been tamed—a little. Old-time hospitality and helping anyone in need was the acknowledged way of life.

Pat l …

We Have Impact is a collection of short essays on design and society. The book was conceived as an exercise in both thinking and framing design into a poetic system of language and verse. The contents and its aggressive periodicity are braided into a single written design project. We Have Impact addresses how the problem of design itself has been o …

Dodging down back-alleys in bomb-torn Beirut. Wheeling past God and traffic in Mombassa, Kenya. Slipping around the edges of Alzheimer's disease, the Gulf War, and the eternity of CNN.

Set somewhere between here and the heat-death of the universe, Jim Oaten's debut collection serves up random samples of literal and literary truth scooped up at top s …

Tracks is a compilation of personal travel essays that range across three continents: from Italy, where Genni Gunn was born and spent her early years, to Canada and Mexico, and through Asia, where she has travelled many times, both reconnecting with her sister and witnessing the emergence of new political realities in Myanmar. While these are journ …

The Deaf House is Joanne Weber’s life story. It illustrates the work and passion of a woman who grew up deaf and became an advocate for the deaf. It is a story of pain, loss and defeat balanced with joy, gain, and victory. Joanne Weber’s creative memoir, shows how deafness can be a brutal oppression of the mind. Her torment of not knowing exact …

A new edition of the much-loved memoir

Hockey legend Gordie Howe once said there were two superstars in the Hull family: Bobby, the Golden Jet and one of the greatest players ever to tie up a pair of skates, and his brother Dennis, who had a solid career with the Chicago Blackhawks, and is now one of the most sought-after public speakers in North A …

Fascinating, revelatory, and powerful, Butterfly MindM is a memorable work from a renowned reporter on the front line of history.

In this memoir, award-winning journalist Patrick Brown weaves together three stories: the first is Brown's own education as a journalist over the past twenty-five years, and his parallel struggle with alcoholism. The seco …

In February 1956, a remarkable young woman named Christina McCall began her working life as an editorial secretary at Maclean's magazine. It was a legendary time there, when the likes of Pierre Berton, Robert Fulford, June Callwood, Peter Gzowski, and Peter C. Newman graced the magazine's pages. McCall would come to join that illustrious group, and …

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 …

Rebel Without A Pause is the autobiography of Winnipeg’s best-known and most persistent political activist, Nick Ternette. For over forty years, Nick was one of the loudest voices of the Left, who ran for mayor multiple times and never shied away from asking elected officials tough questions. A champion of the rights of the poor and the disabled, …

Rain on a Distant Roof takes readers inside the frightening but fascinating world of Lyme disease in Canada. This is the story of one woman's struggle to understand the disease that's destroying her body and mind. Armed with a confusing diagnosis, a baffling array of symptoms, and a body that's filled with diabolical bacteria, she sets out to unrav …

When diagnosed with an aggressive brain tumour, Gudrun Pflüger was told she had eighteen months left to live. Taking the wolf—a true “endurance athlete”—as her model, she immerses herself in the wilderness of the mountain ranges of western Canada and focuses her mind and body on a mysterious and inspirational path toward self-healing.

Throu …

In daily love letters written to her husband and soul companion, Brian, over the year following his death from brain cancer, critically acclaimed author, playwright, and jazz singer Martha Brooks leads us on a journey through grief that is both deeply personal and undeniably universal.

By turns funny, shattering, and uplifting, Brooks wrestles with …

After 15 long years the passion of Winnipeg's hockey fan's was reignited with the return of the NHL. A passion that would sell out an arena's worth of season tickets in mere minutes. A passion that would electrify the home team and send shivers down their opponents's spines. A passion that sports fans live for each and every season.

Part chronicle, …

A laugh-out-loud travel memoir that reveals backpacking’s awkward side.

Sue, a disenchanted waitress, embarks upon a year-long quest around the world with her friend, Sara—who’s exasperatingly perfect. Expecting a whimsical jaunt of self-discovery, Sue instead encounters an absurd series of misadventures that render her embarrassed, terrified, …

The Steppes Are the Colour of Sepia: A Mennonite Memoir invites the reader to embark on a journey that traces the paths of ancestral memory over the steppes of the Russian empire to the valleys of Canada's Fraser River. Connie Braun's narrative continues where Sandra Birdsell's historical fiction Russlander has left off – back to the catastrophic …

One Friday morning in the spring of 1972, an ad in the Vancouver Sun caught Nick Marach’s eye: GILLNETTER FOR SALE. A young architect who had just returned to the west coast from a yearlong motorcycle trip abroad, Marach was not looking for a change of career—but he was looking for a boat to live on, and the price of the old gillnetter was chea …

Before she became a psychiatric nurse at "The Mental" in the 1950s, Kay Parley was a patient there, as were the father she barely remembered and the grandfather she'd never met. Part memoir, part history, and beautifully written, Inside The Mental offers an episodic journey into the stigma, horror, and redemption that she found within the instituti …

Accident of Fate is a first-hand account of persecution, rescue, and resistance in the Axis-occupied former Yugoslavia. At the age of thirteen, Imre Rochlitz fled to Yugoslavia from his childhood home in Vienna following the Nazi Anschluss, leaving his family behind. In January 1942 the Ustashe (Croatian Fascists) arrested and interned him in the …

From the bustling city of Paris to the quaint, countryside village of Champlost, France, Where Courage Lives follows ten-year-old Muguette Szpajzer and her family as they sought refuge from the war. Written in vignettes with child-like charm and innocence, Muguette’s memoir provides rich insight into rural life during wartime upheaval, honouring …

Not Exactly As Planned is a captivating, deeply moving account of adoption and the unexpected challenges of raising a child with fetal alcohol syndrome. Linda Rosenbaum’s life takes a major turn when her son, adopted at birth, is diagnosed with irreversible brain damage. With love, hope and all the medical knowledge she can accumulate, she sets o …

A Jersey Boys book. A Jersey Boys story. A Broadway memoir. A how-to guide to making it on Broadway. Everyone's heard of JERSEY BOYS. Thirteen million people have seen the show, totaling more than $1 billion in worldwide ticket sales. The cast members have performed on Oprah , the Today show, Dancing with the Stars, and at the Emmy Awards. Their re …

Books about abused and emotionally disturbed children are usually clinical and professional in nature; they seldom engage a reader’s curiosity, heart and funny bone all at the same time. Nutmeg, the story of one such child and the help and solace offered her through a network of caring people, is not so much a clinical study as a beautifully tol …

Translated from personal memoirs and diaries, this is a compelling story of Anthony Hlynka, the only sitting Member of Parliament of Ukrainian origin from 1940 to 1945. Representing the constituency of Vegreville, Alberta, for the Social Credit party, Hlynka was a high-profile Member of Parliament who garnered much attention from the English-langua …

It is hardly an understatement to say that each person who lived through the Holocaust lived through a different holocaust. Consider the story of Jack Weiss, who, at the age of fourteen, was deported from Hungary to the notorious death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Desperate to stay with his father, and barely able to pass as a grown man, he recounts …

Until now, information about Dutch immigration to Canada has been scarce as much was lost during the German occupation of Holland during World War II. However, Herman Ganzevoort was able to unearth and translate rare letters and articles written by Dutch immigrants during the 1920s, which offer new insight into the struggles the Dutch faced to fit …

In 1976, at the age of twenty-three, Farideh Goldin left Iran in search of her imagined America. She sought an escape from the suffocation she felt under the cultural rules of her country and the future her family had envisioned for her. While she settled uneasily into American life, the political unrest in Iran intensified and in February of 1979, …

There was a time when it was common to have a company pension to live on after you stopped working. These days, company pensions are rare and a large percentage of the workforce needs to rely on their own savings to fund their retirement years. How do you figure out how much you need to retire, and how many years that money will last? Do you dream …

This volume discusses the autobiographical inclination in Canadian literature, exploring works by such writers as Alice Munro, W.O. Mitchell, Michael Ondaatje, John Glassco, and Susanna Moodie. Others works, including the oral memoirs of a Métis, an Inuit’s account as being civil servant in Ottawa, and the autobiographical writings of pioneer wo …

An Unauthorized Biography of the World explores the practice of engaged oral history: the difficult, sometimes dangerous work of recovering fragments of human story that have gone missing from the official versions.

Michael Riordon has thirty years’ experience as a writer and broadcaster in the field. Readers will encounter a gallery of brave, pa …

This is a story of family, of death, and of the art of living. It is also the story of the ties that bind a mother to a daughter and the dynamics that govern their love. Shaped as a memoir, shared by Sarah Flett and her daughter Rhegan, the narrative begins with the death of Sarah's husband and builds in complexity with the untimely and sudden deat …

The Veiled Sun: From Auschwitz to New Beginnings by Paul Schaffer and Translated from the French by Vivian Felsen with a Foreword by Serge Klarsfeld and an Introduction by Simone Veil.

The Veiled Sun is a Holocaust memoir written in a highly literate style. Paul Schaffer spent his teenage years on the run from the Nazis in Austria, Belgium and Fran …

Laboring Positions aims to disrupt the dominant discourse on academic women’s mothering experiences. Black women’s maternity is assumed, and yet is also silenced within the disembodied, patriarchal, racist, antifamily, and increasingly neoliberal work environment of academia. This volume acknowledges the salience of the institutional challenges …

Discover the compelling stories of the brave and adventurous women whose lives were forever changed by the Klondike gold rush. When the steamship Portland docked in Seattle's harbour in 1897, a group of scruffy men and women walked down the gangplank. There was nothing remarkable about them, except they were dragging sacks stuffed with half a milli …

When the Nazis invaded her small town of Zdun´ska Wola, Poland, in 1939, sixteen-year-old Basia Kohn (later Betty Rich) escaped into Soviet-occupied Poland. Over the next five years, her journey took her thousands of kilometres from a forced labour camp in the far north of the USSR to the subtropical Soviet Georgian region and back to Poland. Afte …

At twenty-seven years old, Robin Silbergleid decided to become a single mother. Not as a backup or Plan B, but as first choice. In her memoir Texas Girl, she raises fundamental questions about the nature of family and maternity at the turn of the twenty-first century. At a moment when SMCs grace the covers of magazines and Hollywood films, Texas Gi …

Long-listed for the Green Carnation Prize and The Sunday Times' selection for Memoir of the Year.

"This amazing book tells the story of an appalling childhood with truth and clarity unsmudged by self-pity. It grips from beginning to end.” — Diana Athill, Costa Book Award–winning author of Somewhere Towards the End

Frank McCourt’s Angela’s …

As Hitler’s army swept into Czechoslovakia in 1939, Anka Voticky, a twenty-five-year-old mother of two, her husband, Arnold, and her family fled halfway around the world to an unlikely refuge – the Chinese port of Shanghai. Estranged from all that was familiar, their security was threatened yet again when the Japanese occupying the city forced …

Anansesem: Telling Stories and Storytelling African Maternal Pedagogies is a composite story on African-Canadian mothers’ experiences of teaching and learning while mothering. It seeks to celebrate the African mother’s everyday experiences and honour her embodied and cultural knowledges as important sites of meaning making and discovery for the …

The authors in this collection examine and critique motherhood memoir, alongside the texts of their own lives, while seeking to transform mothering practice— highlighting revolutionary praxis within books, or, when none is available, creating new visions for social change. Many essays interrogate the tensions of maternal narrative—the negotiati …