In 1945, Alfred Adams, a respected Haida elder and founding president of the Native Brotherhood of British Columbia (NBBC), was dying of cancer. After decades of fighting to increase the rights and recognition of First Nations people, he implored Maisie Hurley to help his people by telling others about their struggle. Hurley took his request to bot …

"Wanted: lesbian couple to foster wonderful eleven-year-old African American boy with gender identity issues."

Meet Antwan. Not only has he got gender issues, he's severely emotionally disturbed, severely demanding and, as he puts it, "born to argue."

In the late nineties, Nicola Harwood and her girlfriend moved to San Francisco in order to be at the …

At turns heartbreaking and hilarious, BOOBS is a diverse collection of stories about the burdens, expectations and pleasures of having breasts. From the agony of puberty and angst of adolescence to the anxiety of aging, these stories and poems go beyond the usual images of breasts found in fashion magazines and movie posters, instead offering dynam …

It's 1965. Twenty-two-year-old Linda Wise despairs of escaping her overprotective parents and her hometown, where far too many know she was sexually assaulted as a teenager. Deliverance arrives in the form of marriage to the charismatic, twenty-six-year-old Ronald Brunson, a newly ordained Methodist minister who ignites her passion for social justi …

In 1922 a lone woman arrives in a filthy frontier mining town in the Pacific Northwest. Her goal: to resurrect her dead uncle’s newspaper. Within two days a naked man is shot dead, a famous man is rumoured to be heading their way and the only man capable of fixing her broken-down press so that she might spread this news is a Chinese printer from …

Growing up in the 1930s, Adeline Beale knows little of the outside world or the looming shadows of a second world war. Addie—as her grandfather Chauncey Beynon Beale affectionately calls her—believes that everything she could ever want or need is to be found on Chauncey’s cattle ranch, the place her family calls home, or in the little town tw …

Sometimes tragic, sometimes uproariously funny, This Place a Stranger is a diverse collection of Canadian women writing about their experiences of travelling alone. From the deceptiveness of the everyday to the extremes of geography, weather and violence, these stories go beyond the usual tales of intrepid male explorers and reveal the varied and u …

In 2008, a small-scale flour miller from British Columbia’s Sunshine Coast created a handmade bike mill to attract a dedicated farmers’ market following. Chris Hergesheimer wanted to challenge the belief that there is only one way—the big way—to grow, process and market grain and flour. For Chris and his family, it wasn’t about profit, bu …

Derrick Stacey Denholm has spent twenty-five years as a forestry field worker, planting trees, marking cutblock boundaries and timber-cruising. In Ground-Truthing, he combines this experience with his perspective as a poet and artist to guide us through the tangle of social, ecological and economic slash piles that dominate BC’s North Coast. Scie …

On September 27, 1986, pilot Theresa Bond and five passengers took off on a routine flight from Atlin, BC, in her beloved de Havilland Beaver. The Taku Air passenger list that day included local politician Al Passarell, his wife, and three of Atlin’s most prominent citizens–including larger-than-life Atlin Inn owner Joe Florence. After an uneve …

When 25-year-old Jo climbed down the ramp of the freighter Canadian Star to set foot in Vancouver, BC, in the summer of 1967, she’d never heard of log salvaging. But within two and a half years, the immigrant from England would quit her teaching job and join forces with one of the most enigmatic salvagers of the Sunshine Coast. Dick and Jo Hammon …

In Keith Billington’s The Last Patrol, he shares one of the most tragic stories of the far north.

It was a quiet December morning in 1910 when Inspector Fitzgerald and his crew left Fort McPherson, Northwest Territories, on a dog team patrol to Dawson City, Yukon. Their departure was without fanfare, and after a brief handshake and a salute, the m …

On a foggy evening in November 1905, 48-year-old Thomas Jackson returned to his home on Melville Street in Vancouver after nine months of prospecting north of the Skeena. Jackson was happy because he had made an important gold strike. Four days later he was dead from strychnine poisoning. Any of the other four people living in the house on Melville …

A diminutive cowboy with a full beard and a Texas drawl stands onstage at Expo 86 in Vancouver telling wild and woolly stories of life in the Chilcotin backcountry. The audience is mesmerized by his poetic ballad of an alcoholic dog that rode on the back of his saddle in Anahim Lake. The performer is Luther Corky Williams.

Originally from Texas, Cor …

Julia Hoop, a twenty-five-year-old counselling psych student, is working on her thesis, exploring an idea which makes her graduate supervisor squirm. She is conducting interview after interview with a group of women she affectionately calls the Molestas - women whose experience of childhood sexual abuse did not cause physical trauma. Julia is the e …

Born Out of This follows Christine Lowther’s journey from the unutterable loss of her mother to the discovery of her own poetic voice through deep reflection and her intimate connection to the coastal rainforest. She looks back on her mother’s poetry and activism. She recalls the day the police arrested her father, and the indifferent beauty su …

Every town has its celebrities, but Sechelt’s own unique and larger-than-life personality is wholesome enough to satisfy all of North America’s appetite for eccentrics. Asta Bergliot Solberg, or “Bergie,” as her friends knew her, lived life on her own terms. She climbed wild mountain trails to hunt for goats, demanded car rides from unsuspe …

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 this much-anticipated second volume in the Extraordinary Women Anthology series, Diana French follows up on Gumption and Grit with more stories of the women who have contributed, or who are still contributing, to the vibrant mosaic that is the Cariboo Chilcotin. The area has more than its share of remarkable women, from educators to rodeo stars, …

In his third book, The Junction, John Schreiber invites us to join him on a journey into the hidden corners of BC’s Cariboo Chilcotin, where he observes and describes a land of mountains and old trails, coyotes and bighorn sheep, Aboriginal folk, homesteaders, ranchers and the stories of long ago.

Driven by his love of this land, Schreiber wanders …

Set in the wild country north of Lillooet and west of the great Fraser River, Old Lives: In the Chilcotin Backcountry paints the rugged landscape and equally rugged lives of the Chilcotin’s enigmatic old-timers: Aboriginal and settler, male and female, deceased and alive. It takes vigilance, persistence, courage and humour to live where survival …

The Tse-loh-ne from the Sekani First Nation were known as “The People at the End of the Rocks.” This small band of people lived and thrived in one of BC’s most challenging and remote areas, 1600 kilometres north of Prince George in the Rocky Mountain Trench. They were isolated and nomadic, and survived by following the seasons, walking hundre …

How do we navigate a world of fast-food joints, big-box stores and traffic jams, where people grandstand in the deli and homeless men announce the end of the world through “slats in the sky”? Where the cumulative result of our lifestyle is a gyre of garbage and plastic in the North Pacific? Al Rempel’s This Isn’t the Apocalypse We Hoped For …

Nikki van Schyndel is not your typical grizzled survivalist. She is a contemporary, urban young woman who threw off modern comforts to spend nineteen months in a remote rainforest with her housecat and a virtual stranger.

Set in the Broughton Archipelago—a maze of isolated islands near northern Vancouver Island—Becoming Wild is a story of surviv …

It takes forty days to know the mountain.

Each spring, over eight hundred climbers attempt to reach the summit of Mt. Everest. The conditions are challenging, and without warning can become life-threatening. Some make it to the top of what is considered the world’s most majestic mountain, but others are not so lucky, and in the attempt to reach th …

How does one go from English villager to wilderness dweller?

Chris Czajkowski was born and raised at the edge of a large village in England, until she abandoned the company of others to roam the countryside in search of the natural world. As a young adult she studied dairy farming and travelled to Uganda to teach at a farm school. Returning to Engla …

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 …

Forty years ago, droves of young women migrated away from urban settings and settled in rural areas across North America. Many settled on the north coast of British Columbia, on Haida Gwaii or around Prince Rupert. Gumboot Girls tells the stories of thirty-four women, through their own eyes, as they moved from their comfortable city-dwelling surrou …

Following tragic events, from which Julie O’Dale believes she and her husband, Ian, will never recover, Julie buys into Ian’s dream to give up their comfortable city lives and retreat to the Chilcotin area of British Columbia. Along with a team of draft horses, four cow ponies, and the range cattle, which are included in the purchase of the rem …

In 1926, Lillian Alling, a European immigrant, set out on a journey home from New York. She had little money and no transportation, but plenty of determination. In the three years that followed, Alling walked all the way to Dawson City, Yukon, crossing the North American continent on foot. She walked across the Canadian landscape, weathering the ba …

Mantis Dreams: The Journal of Dr. Dexter Ripley is a crackling, searing satire that ridicules both political correctness and the restrictive world of academia. But Adam Pottle’s first novel is also a poignant and difficult glance into the world of a man battling a rare and debilitating disease. A wheelchair user living voluntarily in a care home, …

In this playful yet poignant debut collection, Andrea Routley muddies the line between the physical and emotional worlds: reality becomes not simply what is in front of us, but a mutable, fragile place in the imagination.

On the verge of divorce, and in a pot-induced haze, Tom Douglas prepares to roast a pork shank in his new—and contentious—Aut …

Many Canadians say that British Columbia is the zaniest political province. It's too diverse, too polarized—geographically, demographically and ideologically. But the British Columbia political arena is lively, and it has often led the way in electing women to parliaments—as respected spokespeople for the public and as equal people.

In Seeking B …

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 …

Betsy Trumpener’s raw fiction hits quickly, cuts deeply and lingers on in the imagination. Her urgent, unique voice pushes fiction north of what’s real. The Butcher of Penetang carves up rare slices of savory stories that are both tough and delicious. A child missing in a dangerous part of town; a draft dodger with bloody hands; a robber armed …

Dennis E. Bolen’s Black Liquor continues his exploration of modern disconnection and the disparate paths taken by those railing against the austere landscape of their lives.

Imbued with lyrical evocations of lost childhood, mature love and deep friendship contrasted against brutal depictions of grueling labour, industrial mishap, historical misfor …

Most of this novel is based on historical fact, including the actual names of rivers, mountains and towns — a few of which were christened by those who actually constructed the telegraph line. By early 1866, the overland telegraph line had been built to Fort Fraser, east of Prince George. Exploration had been conducted to a point a few miles nort …

Surgei Galipova, a Russian immigrant and a rancher in the Cariboo region of British Columbia, owes his life to the Countess Catherine Stanislavovna Federov. When the Countess asks Surgei to send his eighteen-year-old daughter, Alice, to help her in a private hospital she is establishing in St. Petersburg, Alice adamantly refuses. But when her fathe …

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 Waldo Lake Shackelton, born in New Mexico in 1946, could never ignore the call of the wild. In 1964, spared from the draft, he slips up the coast as far as the tip of Vancouver Island before moving inland. Wending his way through BC’s inlets and coastal mountains, Joshua discovers the nature of solitude; in the ports and villages, he disco …

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 …

The Earth Remembers Everything is a masterful blend of history, travel and fictional narrative, tracing the author’s journeys to some of the most difficult destinations in the world: the Cui Chi Tunnels in Vietnam, Hiroshima in Japan and Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland, First Nations sites such as Mosquito Lake on Moresby Island, Haida Gwaii and Chi …

A courageous and timely novel, Tears of Mehndi explores the rich, complex and often heartbreaking lives of a tight-knit community in Vancouver’s Little India. Through the perspectives of several women whose lives intertwine over a generation, Raminder Sidhu deftly exposes the shrouded violence within the Indo-Canadian community, a difficult and o …

The Light Through the Trees is a remarkable and deeply wise reflection on land, farming, a sense of place, connecting with nature and what it means to live on this earth. As a third-generation farmer, the author’s roots go deep into the land but her work also captures her thoughts on such current issues as the environment, environmental identity …

Two unlikely worlds collide in Sheila Peters's first novel, The Taste of Ashes, a story of redemption and the resilience of the human spirit, even at its most frail and vulnerable.

Isabel Lee's early life in rural BC was forever changed by a brief but powerful love affair with a young Oblate priest. Now a recovering alcoholic, Isabel struggles to pu …

In Leaving Now Arleen Paré, winner of the 2008 Victoria Book Prize, weaves fable, prose and poetics to create a rich mosaic of conflicted motherhood. Set in the volatile 1970s and '80s, when social norms and expectations were changing rapidly, Leaving Now is the emotionally candid story of a mother's anguish as she leaves her husband to love a wom …

In this late-modern period of slackened meaning, G.P. Lainsbury's Versions of North attempts to locate poetic consciousness in the drifting concept of north, using avant garde techniques to reveal connections between disparate elements of signification. Lainsbury borrows from a wide variety of sources, filtering them through the grid of a disenchan …

Annie Garland Foster was born in Fredericton, NB, in 1875. She was an educator, nurse, politician, social reformer, journalist and biographer of Pauline Johnson. But she was also a bit of a mystery.

In 1939, Annie wrote an autobiography titled "Passing Through" in which she described the challenges and adventures of her earlier life: as a co-ed at U …

Maureen Foss's off-beat and darkly funny third novel begins when four quirky and mismatched women answer an ad to join a writing group. Unlikely friendships and wild adventures ensue as their lives start to unravel around them. Bunny, the wife of a calculating, cheating husband, is writing a novel about the best way to carry out spousal disposal an …