“Masuda’s memoir itself takes up most of the space in this slim volume, and reading it transported me to 1945, journeying with this young, displaced soldier whose goal is to either be reunited with his family, living to the north in Sŏngjin, or to cross southward at the 38th parallel to territory controlled by the Americans. What made this a unique reading experience was the personal nature of this piece, written for family and not for publication. It was heartfelt and refreshingly unpolished.” Trish Bowering reviews The Broken Map Home: Escaping Korea, 1945, by Konosuke Masuda (translated by Keiko Honda) (Qualicum Beach: Caitlin Press, 2025) $22 / 9781773861760
“Like Lester’s other American history graphic novels previously reviewed here, Revolution By Fire and Prophet Against Slavery, the action steams off the page through simply wrought black and white scenes that allow readers to literally feel the ‘electric effects’ of the rebellion and its aftermath.” Ron Verzuh reviews The Black Schooner: Rebellion on the Amistad, A Graphic Novel, by David Lester and Mark Rediker with Paul Buhle (Boston: Beacon Press, 2026) $18.95 / 9780807016909
“Gerson does not neglect literary greats like Shakespeare, Dickens, and Longfellow, and also pays tribute to more modern writers like Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood. Although this book is a heavy academic read, themes of humour are also included to lighten the dense and weighty text.” Valerie Green reviews Literary Life After Death: Commemorations of Writers in English-Speaking Canada, by Carole Gerson (Montreal: Concordia University Press, 2026) $34.95 / 9781988111667
“What is Sveva’s achievement? In visual terms, she has left a compelling body of work that is both challenging and uplifting. In psychological terms, she goes through a ‘dark night of the soul’ and achieves what was, for her, a state of enlightenment. She uses all of her knowledge of commentators on the human condition throughout the ages as signs and guide posts throughout her journey. She also draws on her extensive knowledge of the visual arts and, on occasion, paints an homage to someone who she found particularly inspiring.” Adriana A. Davies contributes the essay Sveva Caetani: From Old to New World and Back
“This expertly curated and well-composed book intends to rectify Wakayama’s relative obscurity. He is both the subject of Enemy Alien and, to a large extent, its author.” Philip Huynh reviews Enemy Alien: Tamio Wakayama, by Paul Wong (ed.) (Vancouver: Figure 1 Publishing, 2025) $40 / 9781773272801
“Considering author and journalist Craig Taylor has had such cosmopolitan addresses as London and New York, and such impressive credentials, such as writing for The Guardian, finding him on the quiet shores of Protection Island just off of Nanaimo is surprising.” Trevor Marc Hughes presents an interview segment with author Craig Taylor, filmed on Protection Island.
“…almost everything about this book is careful, measured, and studied. Handling a figure who, as the subtitle suggests, has been subject to speculation and hearsay—but also adulation and condemnation—this book is almost entirely based on careful screening of evidence and extensive documentation.” Theo Dombrowski reviews Oscar Wilde’s Paris: Legends and Legacies, by Collette Colligan and Gregory Mackie (eds.) (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2025) $90 / 9781487541415
A novel’s pensive narrator, a museum curator smitten with the realms of art history and ideas, recalls her childhood, marriage, and quest for personal alchemical gold. A slim book with many literal questions and much philosophizing, it left our reviewer wanting less as well as more. —Brett Josef Grubisic reviews The Alchemy of Paradise, by Susannah M. Smith (Halifax: Invisible Publishing, 2026) $24.95 / 9781778430855
“Robin Ward, a graduate of the celebrated Glasgow School of Art and respected architectural critic and author, does justice to that inheritance. He has added to the comprehensive yet accessible guidebooks he has written singly or collaboratively, including on Victoria and Vancouver, in this province. The photography is excellent and selection of buildings and civic statuary or artwork both astute and appropriate to exploring the built environment of Canada’s one-time leading metropolis.” Rhodri Windsor-Liscombe reviews Exploring Montréal: 151 Best Buildings, by Robin Ward (Madeira Park: Douglas & McIntyre, 2026) $29.95 / 9781771624619
“This is on the order of Monty Python with its delicious absurdity. Nawrocki is at his best when he spins these deadpan, Buster Keatonesque scenes— moments of truthful memory specific to ‘50s Vancouver. This is what makes the book work. The historical details are unvarnished yet amped up with his telling. But as we go along in Joey’s story, the memoir suffers from editorializing of a predictable nature that gets in the way of the stories despite moments of excellent scenarios.” Grahame Ware reviews The East End Rules: An East Van Memoir, by Norman Nawrocki (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 2026) $24.99 / 9781551648347
“Seto, mourning the past and given time to resurrect her creativity, recreated the buildings of memory and left them empty so that memory and desire could replace the ghosts inhabiting them with real lives configured with real information, the sensory details, smells and sounds that gave them life.” Linda Rogers reviews Chinatown Vancouver: An Illustrated History, by Donna Seto (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2025) $29.99 / 9781487011970
“Victoria’s urban landscape is littered with these remnants or references, in this case, to the golden age of Victoria’s great garden estates. They are a part of a legacy of similar markers, such as iron curbs that once protected sidewalks from steel-rimmed carriage wheels, hitching posts for horses stabled in the Rockland and Fernwood neighbourhoods, or small pockets of Garry Oaks that survived from a pre-settlement habitat that nurtured the Lekwungen people. These touchstones of community memory lend richness and meaning to the built heritage that tells Victoria’s story.” Martin Segger contributes the article Silent Sentinels, adapted from his upcoming book Tending Eden: A garden history of Victoria.
“If they are a choir, Genni Gunn, an Italo-Canadian poet and musician, translator of this volume, lifts it out of sea narrative to angel choir. Her sensibilities, like Maraini’s, bring harmony to the deliverance of a poetically nuanced story to universality.” Linda Rogers reviews The Ship for Kobe, by Dacia Maraini, translated by Genni Gunn (Hamilton: Guernica Editions, 2025) $22.95 / 9781778490019
“In BC, cartoonists like Len Norris, Roy Peterson, Bob Krieger, Dan Murphy, Raeside, and (more lately) Pia Guerra have demonstrated what a sharp wit can do with a sharp pencil. Nurtured for decades by daily spots on the local newspaper’s editorial/opinion page, these giants of jest created lasting and recognizable characters, styles, voices, values, and understandings of who we are.” John Belshaw reviews The Canada Handbook, by Adrian Raeside (Madeira Park: Harbour Publishing, 2025) $22.95 / 9781550179538
“I know this collection of work by these women is something readers will refer to time and time again, knowing each time they do, they will find something new to inspire them at exactly the moment they need it.” Valerie Green reviews Something Has Changed: An Anthology of Women’s Voices, by The Pen Pals Writers’ Collective (Nanaimo: Pen Pals Publishing, 2025) $20 / 97810694399505
“Anderson’s love for being in the kitchen and garden is unmistakeably real and infectious. Interspersed with Anderson’s own poetry and sketches, I find the physicality of the book, simply existing in my proximity, to be soothing.” Jessica Poon reviews I Love You: Recipes from the Heart, by Pamela Anderson (New York: Voracious, 2024) $35 / 9780316573481
“First-hand accounts are a wonderful way to experience history. These women were able to answer all sorts of questions that many of the interviewers and magazines from back in the day would never have thought to ask them, allowing Porter the privilege of discovering their stories. Though their stories always were valid, having them recorded as part of the larger narrative is an even more validating experience.” Myshara McMyn reviews Girl Gangs, Zines and Powerslides, by Natalie Porter (Toronto: ECW Press, 2025) $26.95 / 9781770417922
“Besides launching you on a hobby that needs only a bus pass, a big book for a press, good cardboard, and a few standard household items to start, the guide takes you through the steps from rank amateur to friend-of-the-museum-curator.” Briony Penn reviews Pressed Plants: Making a Herbarium, by Linda P. J. Lipsen, with illustrations by Derek Tan (Victoria: Royal BC Museum Publications, 2023) $19.95 / 9780772680563
“The fact, indeed, that Bovey writes with a refreshingly personal sense of appreciation, points towards one of the salient features of this curated exhibition—namely, the fact that just as artists may have “visual voices,” Bovey herself has a distinctive voice. Part of that, of course, is implicit in the selections she makes, but part, too, is explicit in her personal comments.” Theo Dombrowski reviews Western Voices in Canadian Art, by Patricia Bovey (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2023) $49.95 / 9780887550478
“These stories of resistance need to be shared to help understand the breadth of depravity of fascism and its impact that can evolve under unchecked hate and power. Rather than “fascism” being an abstract word or slogan, it becomes visceral when told as a story using sequential art.” David Lester writes an essay telling of how, “as the creeping noose of modern-day fascism encircles us, I found myself drawing a story from 80 years ago.” Partisans: A Graphic History of Anti-Fascist Resistance, by Raymond Tyler & Paul Buhle (eds.) (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2025) $34.95 / 9781771136525
