“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
“I drove to Toronto in the five-year-old blue Plymouth I used at UVM, its body cancered by Vermont’s salted roads. While it was liberating to be leaving my riven country, I was plenty nervous about the unknowns that lay ahead.” Ken Klonsky contributes a chapter of his upcoming memoir Out of the Fire: A Life Seeking Justice.
“As many visitors to Antarctica have remarked, time spent witnessing the stunning abundance of life beyond the polar zone of extreme cold waters and the sheer beauty of that continent is life-changing. Blight witnesses that unlike her experience of previous research sites, which include the Canadian Arctic, Antarctica forever changed her ‘understanding of the world.’ This is her account of that break from ‘The World, The Real World, The World,’ as she and most scientists working in Antarctica refer to the outside world beyond the polar seas. Antarctica is her discovery and recovery back to a saner place of nature, no matter how harsh. It is a place where life meets death and grows from it.” Loÿs Maingon reviews Where The Earth Meets The Sky: A Story of Penguins, People and Place in Antarctica, by Louise K. Blight (Toronto: Doubleday Canada / Bond Street Books, 2026) $38 / 9780385702102
“By the time I got to Simon Fraser University in the early 1970s, Jim Harding had already left campus but his legacy lingered as SFU continued to fester with student unrest after the historic strike in 1967. That event labelled SFU a ‘radical’ campus and Harding was part of the cohort of students and faculty that openly challenged and defied the actions of the university administration. It was a bold, exciting, and educational moment. Harding was among the leaders.” Ron Verzuh reviews The Long Sixties: Stories from the New Left, by Jim Harding [ed.] (Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 2026) $29 / 9781773638034
“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
“There are more than 240 life histories of all the fishes calling the strait home for all or part of the year. Dick Beamish and Jeff Marliave are well-known scientists who have put this book together for you.” DC Reid reviews Fishes of the Strait of Georgia: More than 240 Life Stories, by Dick Beamish & Jeff Marliave (Madeira Park: Harbour Publishing, 2025) $80 / 9781990776830
“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.
“The book is primarily a record of the concept, strategies, and outcomes from an innovative government policy-development approach proposed by then-Premier Glen Clark. At the time Clark’s financially-strapped government was facing ‘an imminent economic crisis.’ The authors explain that Premier Clark was faced with almost 240,000 public employee contracts expiring on the same day, as well as two prior years of restraint.” Richard Fyfe reviews 35 Accords: Re-imagining British Columbia’s Public Sector Labour Relations
by Tony Penikett and John Calvert (Cambridge, UK: Ethics International Press, 2025) $57 / 9781837112791
“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
“An autobiography is often just about an individual. However, when the narrative focuses on the principles that have guided the path of an individual’s development and where they originated, it becomes more than about the individual. It confirms the adage that it takes a village to raise a child. That makes for interesting thoughtful reading as Grant identifies the elements of her life that pre-disposed her to success.” Loÿs Maingon reviews One Step Sideways, Three Steps Forward: One Woman’s Path to Becoming a Biologist, by B. Rosemary Grant (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2025) $27.95 / 9780691260600
“Other animal behaviours too live on in our everyday speech. Even if few of us have ever literally taken ‘the bull by the horns’ or ‘bought a pig in a poke’ (what is a poke in this instance? a bag or sack, nowadays an obsolete or dialect word, so the phrase means ‘to buy something without seeing or being able to test it’) most of us flounder at times or try ‘to feather our nests.’” Christopher Levenson urges us to contemplate the origin of such phrases as ‘free rein’ and ‘ride roughshod over’ in his A Word in Your Ear essay ‘Animals and Language.’
“Nancy J. Turner has spent a career working with Indigenous teachers who have shared their traditional knowledge with her, but as she tells The British Columbia Review, not all is shared, some is private, but one thing is clear: that she is grateful for the teachings.” Trevor Marc Hughes presents an interview segment with ethnobotanist and author Nancy J. Turner.
“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
“The strength of West Coast Mission is the way that Lockhart has sensitively and wisely heeded and attempted to bring the best out of the varied communities he has focussed on. The weakness of the book is the vast variety of other forms of Christianity he has simply not sat with or listened to in the Vancouver area and they are many.” Ron Dart reviews West Coast Mission: The Changing Nature of Christianity in Vancouver, by Ross A. Lockhart (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2024) $34.95 / 9780228022862
“Wiley Wei-Chiun Ho’s new memoir… is The Astronaut Children of Dunbar Street. She tells The British Columbia Review her book may have, in its early days, turned out to be a mystery, travel writing, or fiction, before she settled on memoir.” Trevor Marc Hughes presents an interview segment featuring North Vancouver writer Wiley Wei-Chiun Ho.
“Baxter had achieved years of international success for volleyball and women’s sports in general, and was celebrated around the world for her success, but at the young age of twenty-nine had been tossed aside simply because of her sexual orientation. Her internal rage at this unfairness inspired her to become an activist and expose the inequalities and flaws in elite Canadian sports. This book strongly brings out her message of hope for all men and women in sports to strive for success despite the cost.” Valerie Green reviews Outspoken: A Journey from Olympic Athlete to Activist by Betty Baxter (Gibsons: Nightwood Editions, 2026) $23.95 / 9780889715066
“I had just finished reading Waterfall Hikes in the Canadian Rockies – Volume 1 when I reached for Volume 2 as if drawn by the gravitational pull of cascading water.” Amy Tucker reviews Waterfall Hikes in the Canadian Rockies – Volume 2, by Steve Tersmette (Victoria: Rocky Mountain Books, 2024) $25 / 9781771606882
“While the book may not feature the most extreme, off-the-grid waterfall routes, it is still an excellent reference for experienced hikers. Even for those who have spent decades on the trails, there is always something new to discover, and this book provides a fresh perspective on familiar landscapes.” Amy Tucker reviews Waterfall Hikes in the Canadian Rockies – Volume 1, by Steve Tersmette (Victoria: Rocky Mountain Books, 2023) $25 / 9781771606165
“This book, while intensely dense, is thoroughly researched— a necessary addition to the libraries of Shakespeare scholars, as well as students of media, print evolution, and philosophy.” Natalie Virginia Lang reviews Mediatic Shakespeare: The Dynamics of Orality, Script, and Print in the Plays and Poems, by Richard Cavell (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2025) $85 / 9781487565367
“Food is never merely sustenance; it is narrative layered with memory and meaning. In October 2025, I travelled to Rome and Oxford as part of Simon Fraser University’s Graduate Liberal Studies Program, culminating in a project that combined two themes: Italy in the ancient and modern imagination (with a focus on food history) and life writing (an exploration of how lives are represented across time, genre, and media). I deepened my understanding of the links between food writing, memory, and culture by studying the works of three contemporary authors. Ada Boni (1881-1973), codified Italian home cooking and idealized domesticity during Mussolini’s era; Elizabeth David (1913-1992), a wry aristocrat who sought to liberate postwar Britain from culinary blandness by introducing Mediterranean sensuality; and Patience Gray (1917-2005), an eccentric British artist who followed a vein of marble through Italy with her sculptor partner, documenting rural foodways for posterity. Melanie Monk presents her essay Minestrone and Women’s Lives: A Culinary Palimpsest of Lives Written, Tasted, Remembered.
