Cerebral, inventive, challenging, and deeply, well, bookish, the “whole novel glows with similar interplays of similarly repeated words and issues, ones that touch on the most fundamental nature of the human experience—truth and knowledge, beauty (especially of music), love, and, perhaps most fundamentally, happiness.”—Theo Dombrowski reviews The Book of Records, by Madeleine Thien (Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2025) $36.95 / 9781039009561
“Not one single gravestone stands to mark my family. It is as though they didn’t exist.” —In “The Blood in the Stone” Deborah Lane excavates family history and imagines life as it might have been.
Bold art and great design work together to elevate an already exuberant, well-told tale about Katie Sandwina, a historical strongwoman. —Ginny Ratsoy reviews Katie, Big and Strong: The True Story of the Mighty Woman Who Could Lift Anything, by Jennifer Cooper (illustrated by Jen White) (Naperville: Sourcebooks Kids, 2024) $28.00 / 9781728267814
“Rhenisch jam-packs his songs with ideas, zooming and spanning, yet with the grace of a skilled composer; a song might jar and rattle while at the same time carry a croon that compels. A reader cannot help but be swept and stilled simultaneously in the lyric experience.” —Steven Ross Smith reviews The Salmon Shanties: A Cascadian Cycle, by Harold Rhenisch (Regina: U Regina Press, 2024) $19.95 / 978177940154
“Newland’s talent with the architecture of sentences never detracts from the exhilaration of his plot, with its strange events and estranged sense of time.” —Peter Babiak reviews The Marysburgh Vortex (Volume 1: Jack Wenland, Time Guardian), by Trevor Newland (Vancouver: Simply Read Books, 2024) $22.99 / 9781772291001
Circus-set kids book showcases adventure, mystery, and the fight for women’s equality. —Alison Acheson reviews Ephemia Rimaldi, by Linda Demeulemeester (Toronto: Red Deer Press, 2023) $14.95 / 780889957299
First published November 10, 2017 Emily Carr As I Knew Her by Carol Pearson, with a foreword by Robert Amos. Victoria: Touchwood Editions, 2016. $19.95 / 9781771511742 Reviewed by Kerry Mason * Our understanding of the internationally significant artist and author, Emily Carr, is enriched by this overdue reprint of Carol Pearson’s Emily Carr As…
Read more #200 Emily’s compartmentalized friend
Powering Up Canada A History of Power, Fuel, and Energy from 1600 by Ruth Sandwell (editor) Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016. $37.95 / 9780773547865 Reviewed by Dan Gallacher First published Nov. 7, 2017 Years ago I likened history to a diamond. Each time it is turned in the light, another facet is revealed….
Read more #197 Power to the people
MEMOIR: Lill’s Story: Reminiscences of a Country Schoolteacher by Lillian Emerson Edited by Mary Novik and Ned Young First published Nov. 4, 2017 * We are delighted to present these memoirs of Lillian Emerson (1913-2003), a Vancouver Island teacher in the 1930s who became the mother of award-winning novelist Mary Novik. Born in Victoria to…
Read more #194 Lill Emerson: Raincoast educator
First published November 3, 2017 Mark Bate: Nanaimo’s First Mayor by Jan Peterson Victoria: Heritage House, 2017. $19.95. / 9781772031829 Reviewed by John R. Hinde While industrialist Robert Dunsmuir has long been recognized as the most important figure in nineteenth century Nanaimo, thanks in part to Terry Reksten’s The Dunsmuir Saga (Douglas & McIntyre, 1991),…
Read more #193 Nanaimo mayor rivals Dunsmuir
First published Nov. 1, 2017 REVIEW: Longshoring on the Fraser: Stories and History of ILWU Local 502 by Chris M.V. Madsen, Liam O’Flaherty, and Michelle La Vancouver: Granville Island Publishing, 2016. $29.95 / 9781926991832 Reviewed by Sean Cadigan * Longshoring on the Fraser tells “the story of ILWU [International Longshore and Warehouse Union] Local 502”…
Read more #192 New Westminster at work
Unbuilt Environments: Tracing Postwar Development in Northwest British Columbia by Jonathan Peyton Vancouver: UBC Press, 2017 $32.95 / 9780774833059 Reviewed by Wade Davis First published October 23, 2017 * My father came of age in the 1930s, son of a doctor in the lead zinc mining town of Kimberly in the East Kootenays. To reach…
Read more #186 Northern industrial follies
REVIEW: Wherever I Find Myself: Stories by Canadian Immigrant Women By Miriam Matejova (editor) Halfmoon Bay: Caitlin Press, 2017. $24.95 / 978-1-987915-34-1 Reviewed by Gillian Der First published October 21, 2017 * The third anthology in a series on Canadian women published by Caitlin Press, Wherever I Find Myself, edited by Miriam Matejova, is a…
Read more #185 Diversity of immigrant women
Blaise Cendrars Speaks… by Blaise Cendrars. Edited and with an introduction by Jim Christy, translated by David J. MacKinnon Victoria: Ekstasis Editions, 2016 $24.95 / 9781771711906 First published in Paris by Denoël, 1952 and 2016 Reviewed by Serge Alternês Review first published Oct. 16, 2017 * This upcoming Remembrance Day we might recall and commemorate…
Read more #183 Modernist poet Blaise Cendrars
First published October 12,2017 Nanaimo journalist Julie Chadwick has helped The Man In Black’s manager in the 1960s and ‘70s, Saul Holiff, to posthumously present his recollections for The Man Who Carried Cash (Dundurn $19.95). The long-winded subtitle for this tale of a tempestuous but affectionate relationship is ‘Saul Holiff, Johnny Cash, and the Making…
Read more #179 Nanaimo & Johnny Cash
First published September 18, 2017 REVIEW: The Nor’ Wester by David Starr Vancouver: Ronsdale Press, 2017. $11.95 978-1-55380-493-2 Reviewed by Steve Pocock David Starr’s The Nor’Wester, for young readers, introduces us to fifteen-year-old Duncan Scott, a young highlander evicted with his sister and parents from their rural cottage during the Highland Clearances in the early nineteenth…
Read more #172 Highland Clearances to BC
REVIEW: Florence, Dante and Me by Robert Stuart Thomson Godwin Books 2017 9780995876002 Reviewed by Beverly Cramp First published September 18, 2017 * It’s the summer of 1960 and a young UBC student is about to leave Vancouver, then still very much a White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant city. Twenty-year old Robert Thomson had won a scholarship to spend…
Read more #171 Florence, Dante and Me
Making Room: Forty Years of Room Magazine by Meghan Bell (editor) and curated by the Growing Room Collective: Meghan Bell, Terri Brandmueller, Candace Fertile, Taryn Hubbard, Chelene Knight, Lindsay Glauser Kwan, Cara Lang, Alissa McArthur, Navneet Nagra, Bonnie Nish, Rachel Thompson, Kayi Wong, and Lisa Xing Halfmoon Bay: Caitlin Press, 2017 $24.95 / 9781987915402 Reviewed…
Read more #168 Forty years of making room
Beyond Mile Zero: The Vanishing Alaska Highway Lodge Community by Lily Gontard (text) and Mark Kelly (photographs) Madeira Park: Harbour Publishing, 2017 $24.95 / 9781550177978 Reviewed by Heather Longworth Sjoblom First published September 6, 2017 * 2017 marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of the construction of the Alaska Highway through British Columbia, the Yukon, and Alaska. Throughout…
Read more #165 Alaska Highway before GPS
Cuba from the Inside by Alan Twigg First published September 5, 2017 * For anyone with an abiding love or interest in Cuba, there are many books about the place–more than ten of which are by British Columbians. For instance, when an American professor named Maurice Halperin met Che Guevara in Mexico, prior to Fidel…
Read more #164 Cuba from the inside