“Much of this memoir is about a daughter’s obsessive search for her father’s secrets in his political, professional, and personal life.” Peter Hay reviews Dreams, Nightmares, and Reality – A Family Memoir by Helga Hatvany (Virginia: Mascot Books, 2022) $23.63 / 9781645439820
Montreal in the late 1940s is the backdrop for appealing portraits of young women navigating convention and discovering themselves. —Bill Paul reviews A Real Somebody, by Deryn Collier (Seattle: Lake Union Publishing, 2023) $15.70 / 9781662512643
“Still, this is a pleasant memoir that teaches about medicine…and it also reveals one man’s journey to neurosurgery, fuelled originally by his interest in the brain.” Sheldon Goldfarb reviews The Tenth Nerve: A Brain Surgeon’s Stories of the Patients Who Changed Him by Chris Honey, MD (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2023) $23.00 ISBN 9781039001183
An “archaeologist-poet” celebrates, honours, and meditates on a feminist pioneer. —Harold Rhenisch reviews Lady Bird, by Kerry Gilbert (Holstein: Exile Editions, 2023) $19.95 / 9781990773105
“Andrea Warner has written a provocative, lucid, and fierce book of deep connection.” Catherine Owen reviews Rise up and Sing! Power, Protest and Activism in Music by Andrea Warner with illustrations by Louise Reimer (Vancouver: Greystone Books, 2023) $26.95 / 9781771648981
“Beyond acceptance it is the mentorship of Ian MacTaggart Cowan, whose connection to Peter Larkin that provides Grant with financial support for his first evolutionary research project on an uninhabited island of the Tres Marias off the Mexican coast.” Dr. Loys Maingon reviews Enchanted by Daphne: The Life of an Evolutionary Naturalist by Peter R. Grant (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023) $44.00 / 9780691246246
Highly recommended novella presents “a humane vision from an imagined future, of the potential that arises from valuing connection and collaboration in and with place.” —Dana McFarland reviews Arboreality, by Rebecca Campbell (Hamilton: Stelliform Press, 2022) $19.00 / 9781777682323
“Tlingit participants and scholars, Kan tells us, worked together as equals and their writing is aimed at benefiting source communities through the repatriation of knowledge.” Bruce Granville Miller reviews Sharing our Knowledge: The Tlingit and their Coastal Neighbors by Sergei Kan, with Steve Henrikson (eds.) (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2023)
$60.95 / 9781496236883
Readers may discern riddles, fables, myths, games, magic, poetry, absurdity, and Zen koans in the author’s flash fictions. —Harold Rhenisch reviews The Pink Puppet: A Book of Tales, by Robert Hilles (Oakville: Mosaic Press, 2023) $24.95 / 9781771616966
“In this present book, Ross has himself embarked on a mission, in the Christian sense. It has been a mission of love in which he engages in re-missionizing his own denomination to a better understanding of its historical relations with the Indigenous people whom the Northland Mission set out to reach.” Richard Butler reviews The Holy Spirit and the Eagle Feather: the Struggle for Indigenous Pentecostalism in Canada by Aaron A.M. Ross (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2023) $39.95 ISBN 9780228017660
Romance novel stands out for its approachable characters and inclusion of real-world problems. —Myshara Herbert-McMyn reviews The Predictable Heartbreaks of Imogen Finch, by Jacqueline Firkins (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2023) $18.00 / 9781250836526
“The book features over 150 campgrounds, listed alphabetically, with clear maps and detailed directions.” Amy Tucker reviews Camping British Columbia, the Rockies, and the Yukon: The Complete Guide to Government Park Campgrounds, 9th Edition by Jayne Seagrave (Victoria: Heritage House, 2023) $29.95 / 9781772033991
A debut novel “full of both hope and despair” portrays Ines, a conflicted small town skateboarder new to the big city. —Jessica Poon reviews Late September, by Amy Mattes (Madeira Park, Harbour Publishing, 2024) $22.95 / 9780889714564
“People who attended summer camp, or who wish they had, or who, like myself, sent their children to camp, will enjoy the shared memories.” Phyllis Reeve reviews My Paddle’s Keen and Bright: Summer Camp Stories by Rika Ruebsaat (Vancouver: New Star Books, 2023) $24 / 9781554201884
Quietly affecting novel delivers with an elegiac narrator recalling the “vibrant, creative and tragic world” of his youth. —Theo Dombrowski reviews The Marvels of Youth, by Tim Bowling (Hamilton: Wolsak and Wynn, 2023) $24.00 / 9781989496749
“The intermittent chronicle of British Columbia filmmaking offers many examples of motion pictures that could have been made, but somehow never were.” British Columbia film historian and archivist Dennis J. Duffy ruminates on the films based on B.C. literature that got away, such as Swamp Angel by Ethel Wilson, in his essay Knowing the Country: The Unfilmed Ethel Wilson
At first, the poetic flurry of puzzling phrases is “like trying to drink from a firehose.” —Joe Enns reviews The Goldberg Variations, by Clint Burnham (Vancouver: New Star Books, 2024) $16.00 / 9781554202096
“Staggering, epic, a treasure trove – are words used to describe British Columbia Artists, an extensive digital finding aid to references for B.C. visual artists, started over 25 years ago…” Christina Johnson-Dean reviews Gary Sim’s British Columbia Artists (Vancouver: Sim Publishing, 2024)
Engaging, insightful poems entwine love, nature, and the cosmos.—gillian harding-russell reviews Asterisms, by Donna Kane (Madeira Park: Harbour Publishing, 2024) $22.95 / 9871990776717
Image-rich debut novel sets a naive young character in a new location, job, and romance. Complex problems result. —Joe Enns reviews Rabbit Rabbit Rabbit, by Nadine Sander-Green (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2024) $23.99 / 9781487011291