Francis and Amy Barrow spent the summers between 1933 and 1941 exploring the west coast in their little boat, seaching for and recording First Nations rock art and "yarning" with the homesteaders in remote bays and inlets. The stories they collected help paint a vivid image of a now-vanished coastal lifestyle.

Upcoast Summers

Beth Hill

Touchwood Editions

A collection of warm and funny short-stories about life in the Gulf Islands.

Spinners Inlet

Literature & Fiction

Don Hunter

United States

Continental Dash: The Russian-American Telegraph

In the 1860s, Americans, Russians and Canadians struggled with starvation, rugged terrain and sub-Arctic winters to connect the continents by telegraphthe world's largest building project at that time. The hundreds of miles of telegraph line built in Canada operated for 113 years. Continental Dash tells the remarkable story for the first time from the standpoint of the workers.

Computers & Technology

Rosemary Neering

Networking & Cloud Computing

The pioneer roadhouses between Clinton and Barkerville provide us a living heritage of the colourful era of the Cariboo Gold Rush. While thousands plodded toward Barkerville dreaming of paydirt on Williams Creek, always seeking a faster route to their motherlode, a separate breed of settlers created the shelters that would ease their journey. The trail was everchanging and when the rush was over, the Cariboo-Chilcotin was left with a mosaic of roadhouses and a legacy to build on. These structures had their own stories, tales of wild nights and human heartbreak, sagas of sin and sincerity. In her first volume,Trails to Gold, the author described the early inns, primarily south of Clinton, which preceded the construction of the Cariboo Road between 1862 and 1865. This volume completes the story of the peak years of a gold rush that British Columbia will never forget.

Trails to Gold: Volume Two

History

Branwen Patenaude

Americas

Silences of the Heart

Claudia Carfax, a painter living in Vienna, receives an urgent cable asking her to return to the family home on Vancouver Island, where her elderly Aunt is dying. In a cellar under the house, she comes across an old tin box full of faded letters, and a long buried scandal.

Elizabeth Latham

British & Irish

After the restrictions of an Edwardian girlhood, Beryl Smeeton cherished the freedom to travel alone, and became a globetrotter on an epic scale. Friendly and genuinely interested in the people of the countries she visited, she preferred to travel on crowded buses, in third-class train compartments and on foot. Just before the Second World War, she completed two remarkable journeys: in South America, a thousand-mile trek on horseback in the eastern foothills of the Andes, and in the Far East , a hike for several hundred miles through the hilly jungles of Burma and Siam ( now Thailand). With her infecious enthusiasm and great capacity for fun, she enjoyed even the roughest of experiences- being blown right off her horse in Argentina, and fording dangerous flooded rivers in Burma. When Beryl married Miles Smeeton, she continued her adventures, both on land and on board their famous yacht, Tzu Hang, with all the vitality and zest for life that show clearly on the carefree, independent trips she describes here, in her second book, with such glee.

The Stars My Blanket

Travel

Beryl Smeeton

Asia

Canadas western wilderness was the scene of fur trader John Tods extraordinary life. Born in a Scottish village in 1794, Tod spent 40 adventurous years working for the Hudsons Bay Company and in his later years, served on the first Legislative Council of the fledgling colony of Vancouver Island. Posted all over the Companys vast territory York Factory, McLeod Lake, Fort Alexandria, Island Lake, Fort Kamloops he spent most of his years in New Caledonia.  A spirited and prickly man he was a free thinker, impatient with authority and distrustful of many of his superiors. He was also a lifelong and loyal friend to many of his fur-trade colleagues, especially John Work, the Ermatinger brothers and James Murray Yale. Tod saw astonishing changes in the west, from the bitter warfare between the Hudsons Bay Company and the NorWesters, to settlement by pioneers and the conventions of the polite colonial society.  Few lives have spanned such contrasts. This definitive biography presents the picture of the unusual man in an exciting era.

John Tod: Rebel in the Ranks

Biographies & Memoirs

Robert C. Belyk

Memoirs

A Year on the Wild Side is a witty ""social and natural history comedy"" written by Briony Penn, writer, illustrator and lecturer, with a Ph.D. in geography. It's composed of 52 essays arranged in 12 monthly chapters (ex. in August you'll read about which berries are ripening on the west coast). This engaging book reveals the magic and humour of the natural world and reminds us of our place in it.

A Year on the Wild Side

Science & Math

Briony Penn

Biological Sciences

" I will again go a-voyaging." Sam McKinney has spent some of the most interesting times of his life on the water-sailing a dory alone along along Canada's west coast, shipping out deep-sea on a strange old freighter,having a ketch sink gently beneath him in the warm waters of Mexico. In midlife, when he sold the hull of an ocean-going schooner whaich had absorbed two years of his love and labour, he looked at his boat-building shed and thought,"Hmm. With all this lumber, I could build a boat and go across the continent, instead." So he did. In the Gander he travelled up the Columbia and Snake rivers, down the Missouri, up the Mississippi and on, ever eastward. It took him four summers and three Ganders, one of which had to be abandoned in the mud of the upper Missouri, but he made it all the way to New York City. Now in his 70s, Sam sails the Northern Spray, a sturdy replica of Joshua Slocum's famous craft, continuing his explorations of saltwater and self. Sailing Uphill is a perceptive and evocative memoir by a thoughful writer; Sam describes the joys, as well as the fears and frustrations, of adventuring in little boats on big waters.

Sailing Uphill: An Unconventional Life on the Water

Sports & Outdoors

Sam McKinney

Water Sports

Between 1891 and 1924, D'Arcy Island, near Victoria, BC, was a prison for a society of outcasts. The press called them "The Unfortunates." Why? They had leprosy amd they were Chinese. That they lived is acknowledged only by 15 unmarked graves on a tiny island in Haro Straight. It is the author's hope that this book returns a measure of value to their lives.

A Measure of Value: The Story of the D'Arcy Island Leper Colony

Chris Yorath

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