Falling in love creates an enchanted time, and when it’s on the magical Sunshine Coast of British Columbia during WWII, it is never to be forgotten. The increased emotions of a country at war are always present, as well as the heartache as the young men who joined up to serve their country return wounded—or not at all. For Meg, who is seventeen …

In his 2015 Garnett Sedgewick lecture, award-winning poet and literary critic Stephen Burt discusses the relation of poetry to time, space and place. He examines the widespread and popular view of contemporary critics who claim that modern lyric poetry is supposed to have a speaking self who resides outside of space and time, and addresses readers …

Follow Garry Gottfriedson in this new collection of combative poems as he compels us and Heaven to listen to the challenges facing First Nation communities today. Employing many of the Secwepemc (Shuswap) images and stories, Gottfriedson takes us inside the rez and into the rooming houses in the city cores, but always drawing new strength from the …

Live Souls presents 210 of the numerous photos that Alec Wainman took in the midst of the Spanish Civil War, and his personal story of his time as a volunteer member of the British Medical Unit. Until the present only a small number of his photos have appeared in a few historical books, where they have been valued for their insight into the trouble …

Jim McDowell’s new biography of the little-known Spanish explorer José María Narváez, reveals his significant discoveries during the European exploration of what is now Canada’s Pacific Northwest Coast. Narváez was the first European to investigate a Russian fur-trading outpost in the Gulf of Alaska in 1788. The following year he became the …

It’s spring break, and 14-year-old Hannah Anderson is spending it with the “Coast-Is-Clear” program, a group committed to cleaning Pacific Rim National Park Reserve’s beaches of debris that has drifted across the Pacific from the tragic Japanese tsunami of 2011. Soon after Hannah arrives, Jack, her raven sidekick, discovers something washed …

The fifth volume in the “Forging a Nation” series begins in 1791. The year a new province is created in the country that will one day be called Canada. The year Hope Cobman’s life turns around. At thirteen, she must leave the orphanage where she has lived since her mother’s death one year ago. Alone in the world, she dreams of finding her f …

Philip Resnick’s Footsteps of the Past constitutes a powerful set of reflections on the modern human condition. The book contains poems dealing with memory, recognition, and the slow passage of time, while others meditate on the deep wounds that chronic illness and disability instill. Some of the poems have a critical political edge, while others …

Time touches everything, and in doing so changes everything. The Arrow of Time examines the challenges, transformations and surprises wrought by change, and celebrates the ways we attempt to measure our lives against this invisible force. From John Constable’s home at East Bergholt to the shattered streets of Nanking, China, in 1937, Meyer offers …

This biography explores what drove William Smith to change his name, in the gold fields of California in the 1850s, to Amor De Cosmos. Hawkins traces how De Cosmos became one of the most feared journalists in British Columbia and then how he forced his way into British Columbia politics, becoming BC’s second premier. Although De Cosmos played a c …

Recently granted registration papers for his submarine, Alfred is no longer an outlaw and is filled with conviction to become an active environmentalist. But in Perth, Australia, he is mistakenly accused of sabotaging an oil tanker, forcing him to escape overland and to Tasmania. There he meets up with Merwin Hughes, an environmentalist- hippy. Al …

Lois Donovan’s new historical fiction, The Journal, begins in 2004 when thirteen-year-old Kami receives a bizarre offer involving a historic house in Edmonton, from her estranged grandfather. A move to Edmonton was definitely not part of Kami’s “best-year-ever” plan, but her mother insists it is an opportunity to reconnect with the father s …

Why read Goethe’s poetry today? Ours is an age which prizes both individual self-development and cultural diversity. Goethe (1749-1832) was the first major poet to show how these two values could be combined. Goethe, who coined the term “world literature,” explored a wide variety of subject matter, from love and creativity, to nature and reli …

These poems lead the reader into a world that reveals a balancing act between the familiar and known, the mysterious and wild. Some poems are narrative, some imagistic meditations, and some are small, playful pieces that edge into wisdom: “Here, here, you sing and now / Between me and what I see / lives eternity.” Throughout there is a unifying …

In this breathtaking collection of poems, Pamela Porter invokes the twin mysteries of love and loss to illumine the heart burdened by grief, yet comforted and renewed by the beauty of the natural world. In the long poem “Atonement,” Porter takes us into a human drama, rich with astonishments: “There was no snow, but you could say the snow bur …

In this hauntingly beautiful novel with its palette of blues and greys, Danial Neil explores the world of Reuben Dale after the sudden death from a stroke of his beloved wife, June. Neil takes us inside suffering to show us the thoughts and feelings of the one left behind. Lost without the woman he has loved and leaned on, Reuben wanders aimlessly …

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 …

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 …

In her fourth historical novel dealing with British North America and the American Revolution, Jean Rae Baxter focuses on Broken Trail, a young boy who was born white but captured and adopted by the Oneida people. The great Mohawk leader Thayendanegea - known to Euro-Canadians as Joseph Brant - has chosen Broken Trail to assist him in the daunting …

Chaos Inside Thunderstorms draws the audience into the centre of the tumultuous political, socio/economical and historical reality of the First Nations experience in Canada today. It is poetic expression that examines leadership, resilience, honour, shame, and love. It examines the issues implicit in the Idle No More Movement and the Truth and Reco …

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 …

This comprehensive history of the left in British Columbia from the late nineteenth century to the present explores the successes and failures of individuals and organizations striving to make a better world. Nineteenth-century coal miners and carpenters; Wobblies, Single Taxers, and communists; worker militancy in two world wars; the New Democrati …

For over a quarter century, many readers have agreed with legendary publisher Jack McClelland, who said, “I have never before encountered a book journal as engaging as BC BookWorld.” But over several decades, the populist style of BC BookWorld has tended to overshadow its literary value and its essentially educational agenda. Here in The Best o …

In Seas of South Africa, the sixth volume in the best-selling Submarine Outlaw series, it has been over two years since the young explorer first set sail in his own submarine, with his dog and seagull crew. Now, almost seventeen, Alfred is on the cusp of switching from exploring the world to playing an active environmentalist role in protecting the …

A Night for the Lady explores the terrain of poetry conversation. Each poem arises from conversations with poets, colleagues and intimate friends. They range from a 1998 conversation on healing programs and the fundamentals of world change to a sequence of recent indigenous literary events on the prairies. Within the context of these conversations, …

Sixteen-year-old Darrah is in trouble. She lost her temper and, as a result, Mrs. Johnson, was hurt. Now her parents want her to go to something called a "Restorative Justice" circle that the RCMP suggested. Darrah has to face her parents, Mrs. Johnson, a policewoman, and a "facilitator" who all sit in a circle and decide on Darrah's "sanctions." S …

An old joke goes like this: What’s the difference between a good girl and a nice girl? Answer: The good girl goes to a party, goes home then goes to bed, whereas the nice girl goes to the party, goes to bed, then goes home. The distinction made between the two types of young ladies would probably have been appreciated by Shakespeare. While we thi …

Dr. Frank Arthur Calder of BC’s Nisga’a First Nation was the first indigenous person to be elected to any Canadian governing body. For twenty-six years he served as an MLA in the legislature of British Columbia. He was the driving force behind Canada’s decision to grant recognition of indigenous land title to First Nations people throughout t …

In the second volume of her Hannah trilogy, summer has arrived, and fourteen-year-old Hannah Anderson is excited about spending it with Max (who has been giving her stomach butterflies lately). But things are happening in Cowichan Bay that Hannah can’t explain. When a mysterious accident leads her to a nest of starving eaglets, she meets Izzy Tat …

The second volume in the trilogy that revisions Homer’s Odyssey is once again told from the viewpoint of Alexi, the young Trojan boy. Captured by Odysseus after the fall of Troy, Alexi is forced to accompany the Greeks on their sea journey home to Ithaca. Cursed by the Sea God contains many of the iconic adventures of the homeward journey, includ …

In the Sedgewick lecture for 2012, Professor Deborah Cameron investigates the age-old question of whether men and women are different kinds of beings, both physically and intellectually. She begins by noting that in the 19th century that most writers saw men as being intellectually superior to women in their use of language. But she also observes t …

This stunning collection will break your heart and put it back together again, as Pamela Porter unravels a long-held family secret in a moving personal search for redemption, face to face with the question of her own identity. As she says, “It was this way when Rome was burning, / and was not so different / when dark fires flared / outside the wa …

In this new edition of Jack Hodgins’ Governor General–winning novel (for 1979), the reader is taken into the everyday eccentricities of life in Port Annie on the west coast of Vancouver Island, a town that keeps slipping into the ocean and whose people have long been in a continuous slumber. Everything changes, however, when a beautiful sea nym …

Father August Brabant (1845–1912) was the first Roman Catholic missionary to live and work among indigenous peoples on the west coast of Vancouver Island during the colonial period. He endured long periods of isolation, built a number of log churches and undertook extraordinarily difficult trips along the west coast in dugout canoes. His thirty-t …

In 1939 the botanist Vladimir Krajina joined the Czech Resistance and quickly became one of its leaders. Incredible escapes from the Gestapo followed while some 20,000 radio messages were sent by his group to London, among them those about the pending invasion of the Balkans and of the Soviet Union. As the strongest anti-Communist Party’s general …

How do we learn to be where we live? How can a 21st-century mind, saturated with the culture and metaphors of contemporary life, connect to the natural world that surrounds us? In Nancy Holmes’ new book of poetry, these questions are asked of her home, the Okanagan valley in the southern interior of British Columbia. In these poems, as Holmes com …

In Outlaw in India, the fifth volume in the best-selling Submarine Outlaw series, Alfred and his crew of Seaweed the seagull and Hollie the dog begin their exploration of India with a piece of bad luck when they surface behind a frigate and bring the wrath of the Indian navy down upon them. After a near fatal encounter off Kochi, Alfred befriends a …

In I’ll Be Home Soon, Luanne Armstrong takes the reader on a tension-filled ride as Regan, a young girl living in the inner city, searches for her mother who has mysteriously disappeared. Homeless but by no means hapless, Regan is on her own much of the time but also receives help from a wide diversity of people: a young homeless boy like herself …

In this, the final instalment of Jean Rae Baxter's best-selling young adult trilogy, eighteen-year-old Charlotte sails from Canada to Charleston in the beleaguered Thirteen Colonies to join her new husband Nick. During these final months of the American Revolution, she must muster all her wit and courage when she has to rescue Nick from being tortu …

The conventional opinion is that professional Canadian theatre began in 1953 with the founding of the Stratford Festival. But Susan McNicoll asks how this could be, when the majority of those taking the stage at Stratford were professional Canadian actors. To answer this question, McNicoll delves into the period to show how in fact the unbroken cha …

Pamela Porter's poems celebrate a world awaiting discover. She opens this new collection with a poem entitles “An Offering” in which she brings to the ceremony “poems / for every season — of dreams born, / burning, broken” and, in particular, one that “begins like a perilous grace” to develop as “naked and tender and wanting.” Thr …

Captain Richards' journal is an account of three survey seasons on Vancouver Island aboard two British Navy ships, the HMS Plumper and the HMS Hecate. Between 1860 and 1862 Richards and his dedicated crew surveyed and charted the entire coastline of Vancouver Island, creating baseline information for the nautical charts we use today.

This monumenta …

When a young black man named Seraphim “Joe” Fortes arrived in Vancouver in 1885, with little to his name, no one could have possibly suspected that one hundred years later he would be voted “Citizen of the Century.” Our Friend Joe is the first biography of the West Indian sailor who became a local legend, saving dozens of lives and teaching …

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 …

Bertrand W. Sinclair's The Inverted Pyramid, a best-seller when it was first published in 1924, appears now for the first time in a new edition. Writing in the period from 1908 onwards, Sinclair published over fifteen novels, some of which sold in the hundreds of thousands. In The Inverted Pyramid, which critics often cite as his most ambitious nov …

In this fast-paced novel for readers ten and up, James Graham, a Canadian journalist, is kidnapped in a market in Buenaventura, Colombia, right in front of Marco, his thirteen-year-old son. When the kidnappers try to grab Marco, his father yells at him, “Run Marco, run!” Marco manages to escape, and seeing no possibility of help in Colombia, he …

Ghosts of the Pacific, the fourth volume in the best-selling Submarine Outlaw series, begins with Alfred and his crew of Seaweed the seagull and Hollie the dog undertaking a harrowing journey through the icy gauntlet of the Northwest Passage on the way to the South Pacific. Alfred wants to see those dark places of the earth where horrendous events …

Jack Hodgins‘ first book, published originally in 1976, is once again in print — in a new edition. Winner of the Eaton's Book Prize and nominated for the Governor General's Award, Spit Delaney's Island, a collection of short stories, put Vancouver Island on the map as a Canadian literary locale and set Hodgins off on his literary career. Hodgin …

In this collection of poems, Inge Israel works through Samuel Beckett's letters, his biographies and his actual plays and novels to probe the imagination that created his artistic works. Arguably the pre-eminent avant-garde and most influential writer of the 20th century and a legend in his own time, Beckett presents many glaring paradoxes.

Beckett …

At the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics an unknown Vancouver runner named Percy Williams shocked the sports world by capturing the 100- and 200-metre gold medals. Some said the feat was a fluke. It wasn't. In 1929 Percy silenced naysayers by sweeping the US indoor track circuit, then he went on to set a world record in the 100 metres that would stand until …