In-your-face adventure travel

“Consider the evocative words of the book’s subtitle: ‘A Year Inside the Life of a Chronic Adventurer.’ The three key words? ‘inside,’ ‘life,’ and ‘chronic.’ Why? As much as this is the account of three long expeditions, it is also a frank and supercharged self-portrait. Holding back is not something Wolf does. On the contrary.” Theo Dombrowski reviews Two Springs, One Summer: a year inside the life of a chronic adventurer, by Frank Wolf (Victoria: Rocky Mountain Books, 2024) $28 / 9781771606844

An alternative to “rock bottom”

Touching on drinking rates, the booze industry, and the addicted brain, the guide is also a tool for those worried about their own consumption rate (or that of someone close to them). —Daniel Gawthrop reviews You Don’t Have to Quit: 20 Science-Backed Strategies to Help Your Loved One Drink Less, by Maureen Palmer (with Michael Pond) (Vancouver: Page Two, 2024) $21.95 / 9781774584668

A musical, musical life

“Most readers are likely to experience the whole narrative sequence, not as a life arc, but, rather, a scrapbook of incidents, many wonderfully ‘insane’.”—Theo Dombrowski reviews Have Bassoon, Will Travel: Memoir of an Adventurous Life in Music, by George Zukerman (Vancouver: Ronsdale Press, 2024) 24.95 / 9781553807131

Really tough times

“This book not only helps readers better understand our pre-colonial past and neo-colonial present, it also reminds us that people were tougher back then.” Howard Macdonald Stewart reviews The HBC Brigades: Culture, conflict and perilous journeys of the fur trade by Nancy Marguerite Anderson (Vancouver: Ronsdale Press, 2024) $24.95 / 9781553807018

A Grand Dame and a divorcée

Debut novelist’s tale brings together two women and two centuries in a satisfying book that “sparkles with excitement, history, and the agency of women.” —Valerie Green reviews The Champagne Letters, by Kate MacIntosh (Toronto: Gallery Books, 2024) $36.99 / 9781668061886

‘A relationship with place’

“Amos connects Hughes’ reflective style of painting to his personal association with place in a way that illuminates man, art, and location to the reader.” Matthew Downey reviews two books by Robert Amos: E.J. Hughes Paints Vancouver Island, new edition (Victoria: Touchwood Editions, 2024) $30 / 9781771514248 & E.J. Hughes: Life at the Lake (Victoria: Touchwood Editions, 2023) $25 / 9781771514194

‘Of statistical importance’

The selection of 50 poems highlights “sites of feeling,” which is to say “sites of inquiry, resistance, resilience, regret, provocation, play, grief, desire, glee.” —Mary Ann Moore reviews Best Canadian Poetry 2025, selected by Aislinn Hunter (Windsor: Biblioasis, 2024) $23.95 / 9781771966320

The Carol I didn’t know

“I was wrong about her. Shields is among our best novelists. She is also in the forefront of women writers who have shown us that we’ve been a lesser reading nation for not recognizing the many works produced by women writers.” Ron Verzuh reviews The Canadian Shields: Stories and Essays by Carol Shields, edited by Nora Foster Stovel (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2024) $29.95 / 9781772840827

Clarifying ‘what it is that matters’

Debut volume of poetry exhibits “a clarity of intent and style fully mature and confident in its own power.” —Cathy Ford reviews Boundary Territory, by Renée Harper (Surrey: Now or Never Publishing, 2024) $19.95 / 9781989689776 

North Island nosecount

“The north island looks and feels now a lot like the south island did fifty years ago: primary industries, gravel roads and boys with big toys. Over that summer I worked my way back down through Vancouver Island, one census unit at a time. But the north end was where I stayed the longest, and the area I enjoyed most.” Michael McGovern writes “North Island nosecount,” a memoir of his time doing the 2006 Census for the communities surrounding Port Hardy and Port McNeill, from his book “Waltz Beats at 3/4 Time” (Victoria: Pro&McGo Publishers, 2023)

Allie and Henry meet a neatnik

Set in an apartment building that is “like a big hug,” The Secret Office is aimed at Grade Three readers, “but its appeal transcends easy age categorization.” —Ginny Ratsoy reviews The Secret Office,
by Sara Cassidy (illustrated by Alyssa Hutchings) (Victoria: Orca Book Publishers, 2024) $8.95 / 9781459839465

Slim verse (x 3)

Attractive and handcrafted, a trio of chapbooks also showcase poets with unique gifts for observation and reflection. —Heidi Greco reviews Warp and Weft, by Carla Stein (Chilliwack: Tigerpetal Press, 2024) $15.00 / 9780995863972), Future Tense, by Lauren Peat (London: Baseline Press, 2024) $15.00 / 9781998521005), a tangle of words, by Yvonne Adalian, Mavis Beggs, Elektra Harris, Natalie Hryciuk, barb snyder, and B. Violet [self-published, 2024]

Gold fever’s cautionary legacies

“Eager to explore the tale during the centenary of B.C.’s joining Confederation, their objectives were to ‘separate fact from fiction in Pitt Lake’s lost-creek gold-mine story.’ The authors write: ‘What we discovered instead was a fabulous collection of fabrication, mistruths, and wilful embellishments, all construed into an astonishing tale.'” Daniel Gawthrop reviews Slumach’s Gold: In Search of a Legend—and a Curse by Brian Antonson, Mary Trainer, and Rick Antonson (Victoria: Heritage House, 2024) $32.95/ 9781772035186

Trajectories of a disconnected family

“For the reader, it’s the enjoyment of a thousand experiences and observations unexpectedly articulated, and that’s the thing about this novel. Every sentence.” —Caitlin Hicks reviews Chandelier, by David O’Meara (Madeira Park: Harbour Publishing, 2024) $22.95 / 9780889714762

The outcome of cutting class

“Henry Miller said that Blaise Cendrars was the man Ernest Hemingway wanted to be.” Jim Christy writes an essay to introduce A Dangerous Life, Vol. 1: True tales from the life and times of Blaise Cendrars, the world’s greatest vagabond by David J. MacKinnon (translation), Blaise Cendrars
(Gananoque, ON: Guernica Editions, 2024)
$24.95 / 9781771839228

‘Then maybe/we can keep having fun’

“[A]ctually, strictly speaking, the weather says nothing, even as its increasing excesses implicitly critique the ruinous choices we make as a country and across the globe.” —Carellin Brooks reviews The Weather Says, by Catherine Owen (Spokane: Carbonation Press, 2024) $20.00 / 9781304231015

Conservation through tech

“Karen Bakker was a visionary scientist and scholar as well as something of a poet in the way she presents her research.” Carol Matthews reviews The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants by Karen Bakker (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022) $33 (USD) / 9780691206288

Making his way with words

“He met high-level influencers like former Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff, British travel writer Jan Morris, novelist Mordecai Richler, and up-and-coming political analyst Andrew Cohen among others. He recounts a lunch with future Booker Prize winner Margaret Atwood wherein she tells a series of dirty lawyer jokes. His path had taken him to the high-water mark of Canada’s literati.” Ron Verzuh reviews Line Breaks: A Writing Life by George Galt (Montreal: Linda Leith Publishing, 2024) $24.95 / 9781773901565

‘Our weapon of liberation’

“Once again, as with his previous graphic novels, he offers readers a lesson in ‘history from below’ about how ordinary people can rally against tyranny.”—Ron Verzuh reviews Revolution by Fire: New York’s Afro-Irish Uprising of 1741, A Graphic Novel, by David Lester and Marcus Rediker with Paul Buhle (Boston: Beacon Press, 2024) $18.95 / 9780807012550

Anne the Indomitable

The fifth book in an “inspired by” series “succeeds in being true to form: this Anne Shirley is imbued with the characteristics that have made the original Anne Shirley endure nationally and internationally for over a century.” —Ginny Ratsoy reviews Anne Dares, by Kallie George (illustrated by Abigail Halpin) (Toronto: Tundra, 2023) $16.99 / 9780735272101

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