The Letters of Malcolm Lowry and Gerald Noxon, 1940-1952
These letters observe the mind of eminent author Malcolm Lowry at play on questions of literary technique, on films, and on the beauties and rigors of life in his Dollarton shack on an inlet near Vancouver.
They Call Me Father
Memoirs of Father Nicolas Coccola
These fascinating memoirs of Father Nicolas Coccola, a Corsican-born Oblatean who arrived in British Columbia in 1880, reveal the complexity of the work carried out by ordinary missionary priests.
Robert Brown and the Vancouver Island Exploring Expedition
The remarkable journal of the 1864 Vancouver Island Exploring Expedition, a four-and-a-half-month journey that describes the island's pristine wilderness, as well as Cowichan, Chemainus, and Comox and the coal-mining town of Nanaimo.
Dear Nan
Letters of Emily Carr, Nan Cheney, and Humphrey Toms
This collection includes 150 letters Emily Carr wrote to her friends Nan Cheney and Humphrey Toms, and 100 other letters relating mainly to Emily Carr written between 1930 to 1945, the most prolific period in Carr's career as both painter and writer.
The Railway King of Canada
Sir William Mackenzie, 1849-1923
A dramatic biography of the now-forgotten Canadian entrepreneur, who spearheaded the most technologically advanced projects ever undertaken in the country, and built a business empire that stretched to Brazil, but was virtually bankrupt by the time of this death.
The Struggle for Social Justice in British Columbia
Helena Gutteridge, the Unknown Reformer
Ships and Memories
Merchant Seafarers in Canada's Age of Steam
An account of life on steamships, this book draws on the experiences of seafarers in peace and war and during the depression.
The Vancouver Island Letters of Edmund Hope Verney
1862-65
This previously unknown collection of letters lets us experience colonial British Columbia through the eyes of a young British naval officer who spent three years on Vancouver Island commanding a Royal Navy gunboat during the Cariboo gold rush.
Nobody's Son
Here's a story about a family that comes from Tijuana and settles into the 'hood, hoping for the American Dream.
. . . I'm not saying it's our story. I'm not saying it isn't. It might be yours. "How do you tell a story that cannot be told?" writes Luis Alberto Urrea in this potent memoir of a childhood divided. Born in Tijuana to a Mexican father and an Anglo mother from Staten Island, Urrea moved to San Diego when he was three. His childhood was a mix of opposites, a clash of cultures and languages. In prose that seethes with energy and crackles with dark humor, Urrea tells a story that is both troubling and wildly entertaining.
Urrea endured violence and fear in the black and Mexican barrio of his youth. But the true battlefield was inside his home, where his parents waged daily war over their son's ethnicity. "You are not a Mexican!" his mother once screamed at him. "Why can't you be called Louis instead of Luis?" He suffers disease and abuse and he learns brutal lessons about machismo. But there are gentler moments as well: a simple interlude with his father, sitting on the back of a bakery truck; witnessing the ultimate gesture of tenderness between the godparents who taught him the magical power of love.
"I am nobody's son. I am everybody's brother," writes Urrea. His story is unique, but it is not unlike thousands of other stories being played out across the United States, stories of other Americans who have waged warboth in the political arena and in their own homesto claim their own personal and cultural identity. It is a story of what it means to belong to a nation that is sometimes painfully multicultural, where even the language both separates and unites us. Brutally honest and deeply moving, Nobody's Son is a testament to the borders that divide us all.
Don't Let the Sun Step Over You
When the Apache wars ended in the late nineteenth century, a harsh and harrowing time began for the Western Apache people. Living under the authority of nervous Indian agents, pitiless government-school officials, and menacing mounted police, they knew that resistance to American authority would be foolish. But some Apache families ...
The Soldiers' General
Bert Hoffmeister at War
A complex, analytical yet accessible portrait of Bert Hoffmeister, who won more awards than any Canadian officer in the Second World War.
Undelivered Letters to Hudson's Bay Company Men on the Northwest Coast of America, 1830-57
This collection of correspondence – letters sent to Hudson's Bay Company men by their families and loved ones but never delivered – offers a rare and human history of ordinary people, many of whom were the early settlers of the Pacific Northwest.
Kiss the kids for dad, Don’t forget to write
The Wartime Letters of George Timmins, 1916-18
The letters of Lance-Corporal George Timmins, who served in the Canadian Expeditionary Force on the Western Front, offer a rare glimpse into the life and relationships, at home and abroad, of an ordinary Canadian soldier.
Negotiating the Numbered Treaties
An Intellectual and Political History of Alexander Morris
The story of the prairie treaties and Alexander Morris, a man who embraced a larger concept of nationhood and the role of First Nations in the expansion of Canada.
Champagne and Meatballs
Adventures of a Canadian Communist
Bert Whyte’s fascinating memoir of life as an underground historical rogue who spent 40 years navigating left-wing politics and communism in Canada.
The Many Voyages of Arthur Wellington Clah
A Tsimshian Man on the Pacific Northwest Coast
Drawing on a painstaking transcription of Clah’s diaries, Peggy Brock offers a riveting portrait of a Tsimshian man and his encounters with colonialism.
Elusive Destiny
The Political Vocation of John Napier Turner
This definitive biography of a major Canadian political figure provides a new perspective on federal politics from the 1960s through the 1980s and gives John Turner his rightful place in Canadian history.
Jewels of the Qila
The Remarkable Story of an Indo-Canadian Family
This story about a remarkable Sikh family living in British Columbia tells a larger tale about an immigrant community’s triumphs and tribulations and the strong connections that Indo-Canadians continue to forge with their homeland.
Autism All-Stars
How We Use Our Autism and Asperger Traits to Shine in Life
Writers from around the world - including Temple Grandin, Donna Williams, Deborah Lipsky, and Wendy Lawson -- share their experiences of creating a successful life on the autism spectrum.
Boundless Optimism
Richard McBride's British Columbia
Boundless Optimism is the definitive biography of Premier Richard McBride and a revealing portrait of British Columbia during a time of great volatility and great expectations.
Man Proposes, God Disposes
Recollections of a French Pioneer
A crystal clear evocation of another time and place and a compelling meditation on hope and loss.
A Metaphoric Mind
Selected Writings of Joseph Couture
"Dr. Joe challenges the reader to examine both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal approaches to the world and demonstrates the differences between Indigenous knowledge and Western thought." -Ed Buller
Indian Ernie
Perspectives on Policing and Leadership by Ernie Louttit
Retired police sergeant Ernie Louttit shares stories from the streets of Saskatoon, struggling to bring justice to communities where the lines between criminal and victim often blurred.
Mission Life in Cree-Ojibwe Country
Memories of a Mother and Son
The previously unpublished memoirs of mother and son from a prominent missionary family living near Norway House in the early 1900s.
Rocks in the Water, Rocks in the Sun
A Memoir from the Heart of Haiti
A poor man’s first-hand account of the punishing realities of daily life in Haiti from the final years of the Duvalier dictatorship to the year following the 2010 earthquake.
More Indian Ernie
Insights from the Streets
Retired Police Sergeant Ernie Louttit heads back to the streets in his second book, giving readers a rare glimpse of the realities a street cop faces dealing with prostitutes, street gangs, drunk drivers, and other offenders.
Grit
The Life and Politics of Paul Martin Sr.
Grit examines the remarkable life and political career of Paul Martin Sr., a liberal reformer and cabinet minister from 1945 to 1968, who championed health care and pension rights, new meanings for Canadian citizenship, and internationalism in world affairs.
Leaving Iran
Between Migration and Exile
An intimate portrait of one family’s displacement after the 1979 Iranian Revolution and their search for identity.
The Call of the World
A Political Memoir
In this fiercely intelligent memoir, Bill Graham – Canada’s minister of foreign affairs and minister of defence during the tumultuous years following 9/11 – takes us on a personal journey through a period of upheaval in global and domestic politics, arguing that global institutions based on international law offer the best hope for a safer, more prosperous, and just world.
Reading Vincent van Gogh
A Thematic Guide to the Letters
Reading Vincent van Gogh is at once an interpretive guide to Van Gogh’s letters and a distillation of the key themes that reoccur throughout his collected letters.
My Decade at Old Sun, My Lifetime of Hell
My Decade at Old Sun, My Lifetime of Hell is a simple and outspoken account of the sexual and psychological abuse that Arthur Bear Chief suffered during his time at Old Sun Residential school in Gleichen on the Siksika Nation.
Claire L’Heureux-Dubé
A Life
Going beyond jurisprudential legacy to provide rich sociocultural context, Claire L’Heureux-Dubé is an exploration of the controversial and historically transformative career of the first Quebec woman on Canada’s Supreme Court.
The Constant Liberal
Pierre Trudeau, Organized Labour, and the Canadian Social Democratic Left
Challenging interpretations of Pierre Elliott Trudeau as either the founder of a progressive Canada or an unavowed and destructive socialist, this book argues that he was in fact a staunch defender of capitalist values who helped make the country more conservative.
Yuan Shikai
A Reappraisal
This first major comprehensive study of Yuan Shikai in more than half a century explores the controversial life of one of the most important figures in China’s transition from empire to republic.
The Last Suffragist Standing
The Life and Times of Laura Marshall Jamieson
The Last Suffragist Standing is an unprecedented study of a pioneering Canadian suffragist and politician and an illuminating work on the history of feminism, socialism, internationalism, and activism in Canada.
Unforgetting Private Charles Smith
A poetic setting of a World War I soldier's diary.
A World without Martha
A Memoir of Sisters, Disability, and Difference
A World without Martha is an unflinching yet compassionate memoir of how one sister’s institutionalization for intellectual disability in the 1960s affected the other, sending them both on separate but parallel journeys shaped initially by society’s inability to accept difference and later by changing attitudes towards disability, identity, and inclusion.
Bootstraps Need Boots
One Tory’s Lonely Fight to End Poverty in Canada
In this deeply personal memoir, Hugh Segal looks back on a life that took him from childhood poverty to the heights of Canadian politics and how these early experiences shaped his life-long advocacy for the poor.
Everything is Relevant
Writings on Art and Life, 1991-2018
A compelling and illuminating collection of Canadian artist Ken Lum’s diverse writings from the early 1990s to the present.
The Shoe Boy
A Trapline Memoir
The Shoe Boy is an evocative exploration of Indigenous identity and connection to the land, expressed in guise of a unique coming-of-age memoir set on a trapline in northern Quebec.
XOXY
A Memoir (Intersex Woman, Mother, Activist)
This provocative and life-affirming memoir, by one of the world's foremost intersex activists, charts the author's journey from discovering she is intersex through to self-acceptance and becoming an international human rights defender, and the impact this has had on her personal and family life.
Stone Motel
Memoirs of a Cajun Boy
Dispatches from the childhood of a Louisiana son raised in a roadside motel.
Caroline's Dilemma
A Colonial Inheritance Saga
This extraordinary book skillfully blends diverse historical evidence to tell the harrowing story of Caroline Kearney and her struggles against the paternalistic inheritance laws of the nineteenth century colonial world.
Sylvia and Marsha Start a Revolution!
The Story of the Trans Women of Color Who Made LGBTQ+ History
A picture book about the trans women of colour who started an LGBTQ+ revolution.