Explore the lives of intrepid Canadians who served on the home front during the Second World War.On September 10, 1939, Canada declared war on Nazi Germany. From that moment, hundreds of thousands of war workers — predominantly women — forged a new culture within the nation’s labour, home, and political environs.Courage and Grit features dozens of amazing stories about these women — from farmers’ daughters to lawyers, impoverished immigrants to Ros...

2016 Speaker's Book Award — Shortlisted2016 Heritage Toronto Book Award — NominatedAn account of the women working in high-security, dangerous conditions making bombs in Toronto during the Second World War.What was it like to work in a Canadian Second World War munitions factory? What were working conditions like? Did anyone die? Just how closely did female employees embody the image of “Rosie the Riveter” so popularly advertised to...

Maddi Madigan, while on vacation, careens into Dr. Gregory Connor on a snowy ski slope. Entangled with Greg and buried in snow, her heart skitters, almost as far as her ski poles. She soaks up the magnificent Rocky Mountain atmosphere over the next few days while avoiding an entanglement of another kind—romance. She bears the scars from a broken engagement, and is convinced men and a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis don’t mix; at least that’s what her head tells her. Too bad her h...

From singing to the postman when she was two years old to her annual sell-out tours in the 2000s, Barbara Dickson has been captivating her fans for the best part of sixty years. In her autobiography she describes the joys of growing up in Fife with her talented brother and loving parents, of moving to Edinburgh to find her place in the world and the stresses and strains of trying to make a living on the Scottish folk scene. Not content to have just a successful singing career, she turned t...

"I owe it to many people, and to myself, to set the record straight. There have been many versions of parts of the story in the press over the years, many lies overlaid with truths and truths overlaid with lies. Much of the truth is just a palimpsest, an echo that changes even in the act of repeating it, but this is my story."In the dying years of apartheid, a most extraordinary story hit the headlines. Agent Olivia Forsyth had escaped from ANC imprisonment in Angola. Upon her retu...

Through ear-splitting, thunderous explosions and fearful eerie flashes in the distance, the nurses of the Canadian Army Nursing Service in World War I waited for the inevitable arrival of wounded soldiers. At the Casualty Clearing Houses, they worked at a feverish pace to give emergency care for bleeding gashes, broken and missing limbs, and the devastating injuries of war. Exploring the many ways in which trained and volunteer nurses gave their time, talents, and even their lives to the F...

'More than 70 years ago I was a "gift" for Adolf Hitler. I was stolen as a baby to be part of one of the most terrible of all Nazi experiments: Lebensborn.'The Lebensborn programme was the brainchild of Himmler: an extraordinary plan to create an Aryan master race, leaving behind thousands of displaced victims in the wake of the Nazi regime.In Hitler's Forgotten Children Ingrid von Oelhafen shares her incredible story as a child of the Lebensborn: a lonely...

"It's history that reads like a race-against-the-clock thriller." — Harlan CobenDaniel Stashower, the two-time Edgar award–winning author of The Beautiful Cigar Girl, uncovers the riveting true story of the "Baltimore Plot," an audacious conspiracy to assassinate Abraham Lincoln on the eve of the Civil War in THE HOUR OF PERIL.In February of 1861, just days before he assumed the presidency, Abraham Lincoln faced a "clear and...

Evocative and superbly rakish, these essays are a generous diagnosis of the often offbeat worlds of family, writing, travel, sex and death as interpreted through the real life adventures of Susan Musgrave. Equally at home recounting the lore of her outlaw husband Stephen Reid, or interpreting the arcane rituals of her teenage girls, Musgrave brings to her literary essays that same invigorating freshness for which he has become known in her fiction and poetry. In settings ranging from the a...

Here are all the extremes of wealth and want, prudery and lust, charity and callousness, in an enthralling saga of two passionate families. Here is all the striving and triumph of the rich and the ruthless in the first flush of England's glorious Victorian age.At a time when fabulous fortunes could be made through the will of a strong man or the wiles of a beautiful woman, John Stevenson's genius as a builder and his wife Nora's clear-eyed, brilliant cunning promise to make the one...

Finding Jim describes Susan Oakey-Baker’s struggle to confront the realities of life after the death of her husband, renowned mountain guide Jim Haberl, the first Canadian to summit the most difficult mountain in the world: K2. For fifteen years they had spent time adventuring together around the world: skiing the Himalaya, rafting in Nepal and mountaineering in North America. In time, they got married, solidified a home for themselves in Whistler, British Columbia, and planned on...

The fairer sex get it in the neck in these grisly tales from the gallows, guillotine and gas chamber. You have been warned.From Nan Hereford, the cloaked highwayman who held up coaches with just her fists, to the woman who survived the gallows and took her empty coffin away with her, Female Executions illuminates history’s darker periods with a detailed and factual approach. Grimly funny and darkly gripping, interspersed with unusual last requests and black and white illustrations ...