“Brode has produced a remarkable account of Inouye’s controversial life using a vast range of documents and news accounts. The thirteen chapters head towards a climatic end. ‘What was Inouye’s allegiance?’ Brode states.” Kenneth Favrholdt reviews Traitor by Default: The Trials of Kanao Inouye, the Kamloops Kid by Patrick Brode (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2024) $26.99 / 9781459753693
“Nurses don’t get to make mistakes. This book is written as carefully as Crook navigated intransigent bureaucracy, patients, and children.” Linda Rogers reviews Always on Call: Adventures in Nursing, Ranching, and Rural Living by Marion McKinnon Crook (Victoria: Heritage House, 2024) $26.95 / 9781772034691
Debut book, a memoir, chronicles a typical middle-class suburban upbringing that’s followed by years of filling an existential “black hole” with harmful choices. —Carellin Brooks reviews Sunrise Over Half-Built Houses: Love, Longing and Addiction in Suburbia, by Erin Steele (Qualicum Beach: Dagger Editions, 2024) $26.00 / 9781773861500
“Mahtani is truly aiming to accomplish a lot with May it Have a Happy Ending and the threads of family, illness, work, and other elements take their turns in the spotlight, then drift through the background, reminding us that we are always composed of a range of tales, that nothing is exclusive or simple or from which we are easily healed.” Catherine Owen reviews May it Have a Happy Ending: A Memoir of Finding My Voice as My Mother Lost Hers, by Minelle Mahtani (Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2024) $34.95 / 9780385675208
“Into his own remarkable life story, he manages to also weave world events in history over the past century, including many human conflicts, criminal justice reform and his own personal reflections as he travels the world from Canada to the United Kingdom, Germany, Uganda, and the Middle East.” Valerie Green reviews Boxing The Compass: A Life of Seafaring, Music, and Pilgrimage by Michael L. Hadley (Victoria: Heritage House, 2024) $29.95 / 9781772034738
“Willard Freer’s diaries document a dynamic period in the North, and Jay Sherwood’s Kechika Chronicler takes the reader on many of Freer’s wilderness trails.” Ross Peck reviews Kechika Chronicler: Willard Freer’s Northern BC and Yukon Diaries, 1942-1975, by Jay Sherwood (Qualicum Beach: Caitlin Press, 2023) $26 / 9781773860909
“What an odyssey her life has been! When you think of her beginnings in mid-century Romania and Israel, her narrow escape from perilous situations, and her good fortune, which she has fully utilized, it is one of those stories that can be told again and again.” Christina Johnson-Dean looks back on the life and art of Vancouver-based Pnina Granirer.
“There’s an entire library of books about the marvels of a province that so many put at the bottom of their vacation bucket lists, certainly too many to cite here. But a few recent titles in the not-so-often-reviewed list caught my eye.” Stephen Hume reviews On the Trail: 50 Years of Engaging with Nature by Langley Field Naturalists (Surrey: Hancock House, 2023) $19.95 / 9780888397591, Gumboot Guys: Nautical Adventures on British Columbia’s North Coast by Lou Allison and Jane Wilde, (Qualicum Beach: Caitlin Press, 2023) $26 / 9781773861180, Fried Eggs and Fish Scales: Tales from a Sointula Troller by Jon Taylor (Madeira Park, Harbour Publishing, 2024) $24.95 / 9781990776656 & Backpacking on Vancouver Island: The Essential Guide to the Best Multi-Day Trips and Day Hikes by Taryn Eyton (Vancouver: Greystone Books, 2024) $26.95 / 9781778400100
“After reading McDonald’s memoir…I found him refreshingly spontaneous and unpredictable…I knew from an interview last year focused on his nonfiction book, The Future is Now: Solving the Climate Crisis with Today’s Technology, that he’s one of the most contagiously positive and enthusiastic people I’ve ever met…” Cathalynn Labonté-Smith interviews Bob McDonald, author of his memoir Just Say Yes (Madeira Park: Douglas & McIntyre, 2024) $34.95 / 9781771624206
“Crossing the River is the author’s personal journey of atonement – coming to terms with her birthright of white privilege. The book gives voice to a different narrative of Canada’s history and offers personal insight into the meaning of reconciliation.” Sage Birchwater reviews Crossing the River: An Unsettling Memoir by Sandra Hayes-Gardiner (Calgary: BixBooks, 2023) $20 / 9781777296759
“So, he transplants himself to a new life, a new take on things. How many of us would like to do the same if we only had the courage?” Harvey De Roo reviews The Road to Appledore: or How I Went Back to the Land Without Ever Having Lived There in the First Place, by Tom Wayman (Madeira Park: Harbour Publishing, 2024) $26.95 / 9781990776632
“The emphasis on our human ‘neuroplasticity’ or the ability of the nervous system to alter its functions and responses following injury, ends up giving the most accurate approach to why the pain occurs, while offering hope for possible re-configurings of its pertinacity, if not resolutions.” Catherine Owen reviews The Pain Project: A Couple’s Story of Confronting Chronic Pain, by Kara Stanley with Simon Paradis (Vancouver: Greystone Books, 2024) $26.95 / 9781771648400
“The book takes us through various phases in China’s modern history, from the Anglo-Chinese wars of the 1840s and the Boxer Rebellion, through both world wars, the Japanese conquest and occupation of China, and the advent of Communism.” Tom Koppel reviews Searching for Billie: A journalist’s quest to understand his mother’s past leads him to discover a vanished China by Ian Gill (Hong Kong: Blacksmith Books, 2024) $25.85 / 9789887554660
“The book suggests that future efforts should prioritize rebuilding Lytton with a strong focus on sustainability and resilience. This involves implementing policies that address the root causes of vulnerability, such as historical injustices and environmental degradation.” Amy Tucker reviews Lytton: Climate Change, Colonialism and Life Before the Fire by Peter Edwards and Kevin Loring (Toronto: Random House Canada, 2024) $36 / 9781039006157
Warland is convinced that as writers, “we must learn to live with profound vulnerability.” In doing this, we are filling in the lack of stories that others have been too afraid to tell. We become more resilient in ourselves as we learn from ourselves—our fears and identities—and we can start to tell authentic narratives that our world, culturally and socially, so desperately needs.” —Natalie Virginia Lang reviews Breathing the Page: Reading the Act of Writing, by Betsy Warland (Toronto: Cormorant Books, 2023) $24.95 / 9781770867031
“Reading the Diaries of Henry Trent is valuable in showing contemporary readers that life’s choices have ways of kicking back against more expected plotlines.” Jeff Oliver reviews Reading the Diaries of Henry Trent: The Everyday Life of a Canadian Englishman, 1842-1898 by J. I. Little (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021) $37.95 / 9780228006619
“Sveva, thus, grew up in a world of literary works not only European, British, and American but also works in comparative religion, studies of Western civilization, as well as of the history and traditions of the Near and Far East. Thus, she was an individual outside of the norm of Canadian society in Vernon.” Adriana A. Davies writes about the late Vernon-based artist Sveva Caetani.
“Hunting and fishing for survival is part of life for an increasing number of North Americans. The Port Hardy memoir reminded me that I am not of that ilk and would likely die quickly if marooned on a deserted coastal island in Drouin’s backyard.” Past the End of the Road: A North Island Boyhood by Michel Drouin (Madeira Park: Harbour Publishing, 2024) $24.95 / 9781990776670
“Although Roche has had to constantly encounter resistance to his own appearance by those who consider him initially repellant, it is this very impasse that enables him to teach and learn and develop more immense layers of empathy.” Catherine Owen reviews Standing at the Back Door of Happiness: And How I Unlocked It by David Roche (Madeira Park: Harbour Publishing, 2024) $22.95 / 9781990776762
“Burn, baby, burn, they must have said and this is the fire in Bowering who…is on a feminist re-investigation of the legacy of a lost lady poet.” Linda Rogers reviews More Richly in Earth: A Poet’s Search for Mary MacLeod by Marilyn Bowering (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2024) $34.95 / 9780228021124