During the second half of the 19th century, thousands of Chinese men arrived on the west coast of North America, seeking to escape poverty and make their fortunes in the goldfields or working on the railroads. Among them was 36-year-old Yip Sang, a native of Guangdong province in southeast China, who arrived in Vancouver in 1881 after failing to st …

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 …

Einstein’s Gift follows the life and work of Nobel laureate Dr. Fritz Haber, a man who risked everything for a country that never accepted him. Haber, a chemist who worked hard to enhance life, discovered too late that when his knowledge was put in the hands of the wrong people, millions would die and that his efforts to serve humanity were futil …

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 …

It is the spring of 1885 and the Northwest Rebellion has broken out. Amid the chaos of the Battle of Batoche, a grisly act leaves Reuben Wake dead. A Metis man is arrested for the crime, but he claims innocence. When Durrant Wallace, sergeant in the North West Mounted Police, begins his own investigation into the man’s possible motives, he learns …

In his debut novel, The Wolsenburg Clock, Vancouver Island poet Jay Ruzesky sets out to tell the multi-century history of an astronomical clock in a small Austrian city. The clock is a mechanical marvel for its time, viewed in much the same way as we treat current 3-D wonders like Avatar. As the hours and minutes tick by, the movement of the planet …

The colony of British Columbia, 1863. Boston Jim Milroy, a lone trapper and trader with an eidetic memory and a tragic unreckoned past, has become obsessed with reciprocating a seemingly minor kindness from the loquacious Dora Hume, a settler in the Cowichan Valley of Vancouver Island. Dora's kindness and her life story both haunt Boston Jim, and …

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 …

At once a memoir, a work of philosophy, a story of European immigration to Canada's dark places of the earth, and an exploration of the roots and effects of colonialism, The Wolves At Evelyn: Journeys Through a Dark Century is a stylistic and rhetorical tour de force from one of Canada's master prose stylists.

Dissident communists fleeing 1920s Germ …

Jane Priddle, a proper young Englishwoman, has lived a sheltered, genteel life. In 1897, she is offered a life-changing opportunity: she will travel to Canada's northwest frontier to search for young Billie Thomm.

Surviving in the gutters of London, England, Billie had acquired the cunning of someone twice his 15 years, but a moment of desperation a …

“The Black Barber of Barkerville,” as Wellington Delaney Moses was known, came to British Columbia from San Francisco, looking for a new home and a place of peace. He was among the first black people to arrive in B.C., hoping that the colony, with its Creole governor, James Douglas, would offer a more tolerant and welcoming frontier than had Ca …

It was 1862 and the Cariboo Gold Rush was in full swing. Sophia Cameron, the Beauty of Barkerville, lay dying of typhoid when her husband, John Cariboo Cameron, made one last promise to his fading young wife. The Promise is a compelling story of a great love and an epic struggle to honour a dying wife's final request: to take her body home to easte …

Timeless tales about wilderness living.

Eric Collier's riveting recollections about the 26 years that he, his wife Lillian and son Veasy spent homesteading in the isolated Chilcotin wilderness made for an international bestseller and one of the most famous books ever written about British Columbia.

In the early 1930s, Collier and his family moved t …

Finalist for the 2012 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize

During the bloodiest single-day battle in American history, Anson Baird, a surgeon for the Union Army, is on the front line tending to the wounded. As the number of casualties rises, a mysterious soldier named John comes to Anson's aid. Deeply affected by the man's selfless actions, Anson soo …

The Horseman’s Last Call presents the closing chapters in the life of Wild Jack Strong. The story opens with Jack content on the ranch he had always dreamed of, with a loving wife and an adopted son. His good friend Jim Spencer and Jim’s family live just down the road, so life couldn’t be better.

However, things take an unwanted turn when war …

The year is 1885 and Abigail Peacock is resisting what seems to be an inevitable future—a sensible career as a teacher and marriage to the earnestly attentive local storeowner.

But then she buys a rifle, and everything changes.

This Godforsaken Place is the absorbing tale of one tenacious woman’s journey set against the dramatic backdrop of the …

Reliving the adventures of past explorers.

Trail to the Interior is R. M. Patterson's rich account of exploration and personal adventure in the Cassiar district of British Columbia. The trail is the historic track from Wrangell, Alaska, along the Stikine and Dease rivers and across the height of the land into the valleys of the Liard and the Mackenz …

In the summer of 1930, fifteen-year-old Matthew Clayton's mother dies, leaving him alone in Vancouver. Using the Union Steamship ticket she gave him, he sets out in search of his father, who is logging somewhere on the rugged West Coast. Matt boards the SS Cardena and begins an incredible voyage up the Inside Passage and through the isolated coasta …

When the beautiful and flirtatious Eleanor Wentworth is sent away from London in 1870 for her scandalous behaviour, she arrives, angry and rebellious, in Victoria, a town that falls far below her expectations of society. Soon, however, she is befriended by Celia Turner, the freethinking young wife of a conservative minister, and unlikely though it …

Winner of a 2016 Independent Publisher Book Award

Born a slave on a rice plantation in South Carolina, John Ware (1845–1905) became one of the most successful independent ranchers in southern Alberta through the sheer force of his will and through his incredible skill at the cowboy trade.

This fascinating historical novel details his adventures, as …

Last Airlift is the true story of the last Canadian airlift operation that left Saigon and arrived in Toronto on April 13, 1975. Son Thi Anh Tuyet was one of 57 babies and children on that flight. Based on personal interviews and enhanced with archive photos, Tuyet's story of the Siagon orphanage and her flight to Canada is an emotional and suspens …

In the mid-1800s, southern Alberta was dominated by the tribes of the Blackfoot Confederacy. Snake Woman, from the Blackfoot Blood tribe, was born into a life of respect and cooperation with the rhythm of the natural world, a rhythm that seems to be irreparably disrupted by the advance of European traders and settlers. Eleanor, newly transplanted t …

With careful research and imagination, author Linda Goyette has created a collection of 25 stories based on the true stories of named children of the past and present.

Too often the youngest Canadians are erased from our historical memory. Rocky Mountain Kids provides firstperson creative non-fiction narratives from the region's children, many of wh …

Children and teenagers stroll between the skyscrapers in Vancouver, and experience the city in a different way that adults do. They have helped Vancouver transform from humble trading post to towering metropolis, yet how often are they asked to tell their side of the story? Vancouver Kids is a collection of tales about the unforgettable young peopl …

Born and brought up in Whitechapel, John Sebastian Helmcken worked his way through apprenticeships as a chemist and a medical pupil before gaining admission to Guy's Hospital to complete his training. The accounts he gives of working class family life and of the great economic and social disadvantages he had to confront in order to become a doctor …

In 1750, Thomas Gunn, along with three friends, join the Hudson's Bay Company and sail from Stromness on the Orkney Islands of northern Scotland to York Factory fort on Hudson's Bay. They believe they are starting a new and exciting life in what is called Rupert's Land, but tragedy follows them, striking for the first time on the ship.

At the 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 …

Set in the early autumn of 1943, the These Good Hands interweaves the biography of French sculptor Camille Claudel and the story of the nurse who cares for her during the final days of her thirty-year incarceration in France's Montdevergues Asylum. Biographers have suggested that Claudel survived her long internment by writing letters, few of which …

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 …

In the midst of a dangerous raid, Tassia, an elite soldier from the Wheat Sky empire, rescues Sam, a wandering nomad, from inside the compound of a lunatic enchantress. While Sam serves his debt to Wheat Sky, he and Tassia grow closer as they tend her garden together. Sam falls in love wholly and immediately, but Tassia’s feelings bloom slowly, a …

Two hundred years after his death, the Shawnee chief Tecumseh is still considered one of the greatest leaders of North America's First Peoples. This richly illustrated biography tells the story of his remarkable life, culminating in the War of 1812.

Tecumseh lived during turbulent times, when the thirteen colonies that were to become the United Sta …

Set in Vancouver in 1907, Better the Devil You Know is the outrageous tale of three unique and curious characters: the small-time con man who passes himself off as an evangelical preacher, the scrawny street-worker whom he reluctantly befriends, and the five-year-old hellion left in his care by a former lady friend. In the course of their adventure …

This historical biography—based on the life of British Columbia pioneer John Muir—tells the amazing story of a family from Scotland who came out to Canada in the late 1840s to work as "consignee" labourers for the Hudson's Bay Company. Ashby recreates the story of the Muirs' struggle to develop a place for themselves in the hierarchic colony ru …

A Mind at Sea is an intimate window into a vanished time when Canada was among the world's great maritime countries. Between 1856 and 1877, Henry Fry was the Lloyd's agent for the St. Lawrence River, east of Montreal. The harbour coves below his home in Quebec were crammed with immense rafts of cut wood, the river's shoreline sprawled with yards wh …

In thirteenth century France, a catastrophic fire has destroyed the greatest shrine in Christendom. Out of the ashes of the tragedy, history leaves a shadowy tale of a miracle, of the resurrection of faith, and of reconstruction—the erection of the masterwork of Gothic architecture, the Cathedral at Chartres. At the time of the fire, a powerful v …

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 …

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 …

Pilgrimage opens in the deep winter of 1891 on the Métis and missionary settlement of Lac St. Anne, Canada. A young woman of mixed-blood named Mahkesîs is carrying the child of the married Englishman who manages the Hudson Bay Company trading post. She is forced to reveal her devastating secret to her Cree grandmother. As an unmarried Catholic gi …

In this reworking of Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale, the magical worlds of Saami shamanism and the Kalevala coexist with the polite Victorian society of nineteenth-century Scandanavia. At a time when traditional faith is challenged by modern science, the old pagan gods still haunt the northern forests. One of the novel's two heroines, Ritva, …

Found on the history shelves of the Greater Victoria Public Library, these twenty true stories are brought to life by Stephen Ruttan. They draw a picture of the life of a city with a recent past that's both unconventional and colourful. From Miss Wilson and her famous parrot, Louis, to Jimmy Chicken Island, named after a man who acquired his surnam …

Through his incredibly varied fifty-year career, John J. Healy left an indelible mark on the Canadian and American west. At different points in his storied life, Healy was a soldier, a trapper, a prospector, a free trader, an explorer, a horse dealer, a scout, a lawman, a newspaper editor, a speculator, a merchant, a capitalist, a historian, and a …

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 …

In 1966, Ken Leishman stepped onto the Winnipeg Airport tarmac and into the pages of Canadian history as the mastermind behind the country's largest gold theft. Known as the "flying bandit" or the "gentleman bandit," Leishman had already gained Dillingeresque notoriety as a bank robber when he stole the public's imagination with his last great expl …

Things are not well with the Wittenbergs. Alice has given birth to her second child with a genetic disorder. Millicent has withdrawn into a depression. Joseph must choose between being principal of George Sutton Collegiate and the new English teacher who's caught his eye. And Mia finds herself at the mercy of an unsympathetic teacher while her attr …

It's a great day for Greece when Perseus defeats the dreaded kraken. But victory begins to lose its lustre when the remains of the beast swamp the shores and fishing nets of the Aegean. Now after weeks of kraken cakes, kraken kabobs, kraken fritters, and kraken stew, everybody is getting decidedly sick of kraken - none more so than Chef Pelops.

In …

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 …

Zachary's Horses picks up where Zachary’s Gold left off and continues the adventures of Zachary Beddoes. It is 1870, and the ex-lawman is hiding out in the capital of colonial British Columbia, using the name Lincoln Zachary. He soon befriends a series of locals: a young woman with a mysterious background; a pair of young English gentlemen, who a …

“This is the story of how you were loved,” Penelope MacLaughlin whispers to her granddaughter.

Penelope MacLaughlin marries a miller and gradually discovers he is not as she imagined. Nonetheless she remains determined to make the best of life at the lonely mill up the Gunn Brook as she struggles to build a home around her husband’s eccentri …

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 …

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 …