Jeffery Williams offers a vivid retelling of his childhood in Calgary during the depression, followed by the outbreak of war and his enthusiastic enrolment in the Canadian Army. First sent to England in 1939, eager and untrained, Williams went on to a thirty-three year career, experiencing wars in Europe and Korea, and serving inCanada, Germany, th …

Alequiers is the story of a one–hundred–year–old log house on the banks of the Highwood River in Southern Alberta, with particular emphasis on the time that author Mike Schintz and his family spent there. The book details what little is known about Alexander McQueen Weir, the original settler on the site and goes on to describe the changes in …

Elizabeth Smith Shortt was one of the first three women to obtain a medical degree in Canada, and her husband, Adam Shortt, enjoyed a successful career as a professor of politics and economics at Queen’s University in Kingston. In 1908 Adam Shortt relocated his family to Ottawa to take up a commission to oversee civil service reform under Prime M …

First published more than twenty years ago as My Dear Maggie, this new edition of William Wallace's letters home to England provides rare documentation of the earliest days of settlement in the West. The correspondence conveys a sense of unspoken courage--the courage that was needed to make a fresh start in a strange new land.

"William's letters con …

In Rogues and Rebels, Brian Brennan chronicles the mavericks, iconoclasts, and adventurers who threw away the rulebook, thumbed their noses at convention, and let their detractors howl. They never retracted, never explained, never apologized, and they got things done. Discover the unforgettable characters who made the West what it is today. You kno …

As the South African War reached its grueling end in 1902, colonial interests at the highest levels of the British Empire hand-picked teachers from across the Commonwealth to teach the thousands of Boer children living in concentration camps. Highly educated, hard working, and often opinionated, E. Maud Graham joined the Canadian contingent of fort …

A young Canadian marches over the Pyrenees and enters into history by joining the International Brigades—men and women from around the world who volunteered to fight against fascism in the Spanish Civil War. This new edition of Ted Allan’s novel, This Time a Better Earth, reintroduces readers to the electrifying milieu of the Spanish Civil War …

The Act of Killing is a documentary film on the Indonesian genocide that took place between October 1965 and March 1966, during which time an estimated 500,000 to 2.5 million accused communists, including landless farmers, unionized workers, labour organizers, intellectuals and ethnic Chinese Indonesians, were killed. However, much of the film is d …

Conrad Kain is a titan amongst climbers in Canada and is well-known in mountaineering circles all over the world. His letters to Amelie Malek-a life-long friend-offer a candid view into the deepest thoughts of the Austrian mountain guide, and are a perfect complement to his autobiography, Where the Clouds Can Go. The 144 letters provide a unique an …

Available in English for the first time, Joaquim Amat-Piniella’s searing Catalan novel, K.L. Reich, is a central work of testimonial literature of the Nazi concentration camps. Begun immediately after Amat-Piniella’s liberation in 1945, the book is based on his own four-year internment at Mauthausen.

“When the war is over, remember all this. …

Scholar and diplomat Brian L. Evans gives us the first English-language biography of Chester A. Ronning (1894-1984): diplomat, politician, educator, and one of Canada's major public figures. This fascinating story depicts Ronning, the man who received many honours, and deepens readers' knowledge of Canada's post-World War II diplomacy and Canada-Ch …

We All Giggled tells the stories of two families that came together when the author’s parents met and married in 1945. The Hüglins had lost most of their fortune in the course of two world wars, and the Wachendorff s had survived the Nazi years despite their Jewish ancestry. The families’ roots are traced back to a vineyard in southern Germany …

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 …

Letters from Canada to the mother of child war guests from Britain are "an extraordinary slice of wartime Canadian life." — J.L. Granatstein

The Second World War had been under way for a year when Marie and John Williamson welcomed two English brothers to join them and their two children in their small house in north Toronto for the duration of th …

In this new edition of a prairie classic, Andreas Schroeder fictionalizes the true story of Tom Sukanen's wild scheme to build an ocean-going ship in the middle of a wheat field in Saskatchewan. Set during the hardships of the "Dirty Thirties," Dustship Glory presents us with Sukanen's mythic effort to escape both the drought and pestilence of his …

Autobiographical impostures, once they come to light, appear to us as outrageous, scandalous. They confuse lived and textual identity (the person in the world and the character in the text) and call into question what we believe, what we doubt, and how we receive information. In the process, they tell us a lot about cultural norms and anxieties. Bu …

The Wartime Letters of Leslie and Cecil Frost, 1915–1919 brings to light the correspondence between two officer brothers and their family at home from 1915 to 1919. Despite wartime censorship, Leslie and Cecil wrote frank and forthright letters that show how the young men viewed the war, as well as what they observed both during training and from …

A transcription of Lucy Peel’s wonderfully readable journal was recently discovered in her descendent’s house in Norwich, England. Sent in regular installments to her transatlantic relatives, the journal presents an intimate narrative of Lucy’s Canadian sojourn with her husband, Edmund Peel, an officer on leave from the British navy. Her dail …

Using the journals of W. Norman Rudolf (1835-1886), a Victorian merchant, Evangelical Balance Sheet: Character, Family, and Business in Mid-Victorian Nova Scotia explores the important role of character ideals and evangelicalism in mid-Victorian culture.

Rudolf’s diary, with its daily weather observations, its account of family matters, of social …

Maurice Yacowar challenges genre and form in Roy & Me, a cross between memoir and fiction, truth and distortion. It is the exploration of Yacowar’s relationship with Roy Farran—soldier, politician, author, mentor—and his conflict with Farran’s anti-Semitic past. Best known for his service with the British Special Air Service during World Wa …

A young girl falls asleep in the Joseph Schneider Haus and wakes up in the 1850s. At the same time, a tramp boy seeks sanctuary from a cruel master. Caught in the past, the young girl, Elizabeth Salisbury, is thrust into the drama of the tramp boy’s struggle to remain free.

Lexi, a young Mennonite woman from Saskatchewan, comes to work as housekeeper and nanny for a doctor’s family in Waterloo, Ontario, during the Great Depression.

Dr. Gerald Oliver is a handsome philanderer who lives with his neurotic and alcoholic wife, Cammy, and their two children. Lexi soon adapts to modern conveniences, happily wears Cammy’s …

In 1949, Margaret Norquay moved with her new husband, a minister with the United Church of Canada, to Mayerthorpe, in northern Alberta, a village in the centre of what was in those days a pioneer hinterland. Broad Is the Way is a collection of stories from their seven years there. Told with affection and gentle humour, the stories cover the challen …

Olivia Cockett was twenty-six years old in the summer of 1939 when she responded to an invitation from Mass Observation to “ordinary” individuals to keep a diary of their everyday lives, attitudes, feelings, and social relations. This book is an annotated, unabridged edition of her candid and evocative diary.

Love and War in London: A Woman’s …

163256: A Memoir of Resistance is Michael Englishman’s astonishing story of courage, resourcefulness, and moral fibre as a Dutch Jew during World War II and its aftermath, from the Nazi occupation of Holland in 1940, through his incarceration in numerous death and labour camps, to his eventual liberation by Allied soldiers in 1945 and his emigrat …

Becoming My Mother’s Daughter: A Story of Survival and Renewal tells the story of three generations of a Jewish Hungarian family whose fate has been inextricably bound up with the turbulent history of Europe, from the First World War through the Holocaust and the communist takeover after World War II, to the family’s dramatic escape and emmigra …

Thomas Douglas, the Fifth Earl of Selkirk (1770–1820), was a complex man of his times, whose passions left an indelible mark on Canadian history. A product of the Scottish Enlightenment and witness to the French Revolution, he dedicated his fortune and energy to the vision of a new colony at the centre of North America. His final legacy, the Red …

A dreamer of dreams, an adventurer, and a man of many ideas, Roger Pocock was an inveterate, world-ranging traveler who lived the life that all adventurous boys desire. He listened with wonder to the stories of all those he met, be they outlaws like Butch Cassidy, ranchers, or mounted police. Readers of all ages and classes eagerly devoured Pocock� …

Canada's Indian policy has, since the 1830s, consisted mainly of attempts at cultural replacement. Although rarely practised, cultural synthesis of native and western cultures has been advocated as an important alternative especially in the last ten years. This book is a study of E.F. Wilson (1844–1915), a Canadian missionary of British backgrou …

Renaissance and Reformation—partners or enemies? The popular image of these two historical phenomena is one of opposition and contradiction: the Renaissance was a cultural revival influenced by classical philosophy; the Reformation was a radical religious movement which rejected traditional authority. But in the life and work of Peter Martyr Verm …

During a time of two world wars and a sluggish world economy, many Northern Europeans left their homelands to build the American and Canadian West with dreams of abundance and new life. Spanning a period from the late 1800s to the mid-1900s, To Be a Cowboy recounts the dreams and realities of a father and a son.

Otto Christensen came to North Ameri …

Debate still rages on about who invented baseball. But one thing is certain...it was alive and fractious in southwestern Ontario in the summer of 1949. Charlie Hodge, just finishing his last year of high school, has made the Galt Terriers’ roster and will be riding the bench with a star-studded team, many of whom had played with the major leagues …