Finalist, Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize (BC Book Prizes)Finalist, City of Vancouver Book PrizeLong listed for CBC Canada Reads 2015The Door Is Open is a compassionate, reflective, and informative memoir about three-and-a-half years spent volunteering at a skid row drop-in centre in Vancouver’s downtown eastside. In an area most renowned for its shocking social ills, and the notorious distinction of holding the country‘s “very poorest forward sortation area...

Mink is a witness, a shape shifter, compelled to follow the story that has ensnared Celia and her village, on the West coast of Vancouver Island in Nuu’Chahlnuth territory.Celia is a seer who — despite being convinced she’s a little “off” — must heal her village with the assistance of her sister, her mother and father, and her nephews.While mink is visiting, a double-headed sea serpent falls off the house front during a fierce storm. The old snake, ostracized from the villa...

Winner, SFU Writer's Studio's First Book Competition (2010)Winner, Canadian Authors Association Exporting Alberta Award (2011)Unmarried and pregnant in 1968 Winnipeg, teenager Myrl Coulter found herself at a loss. Unable (and perhaps unwilling) to support her child, Myrl’s parents forced her to give the baby up for adoption. After being sent to a home for unwed mothers, Myrl gave birth in a desolate hospital room and then found herself at the mercy of a closed adoption proc...

Winner, City of Victoria Butler Book PrizeFinalist, Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-FictionNominated for the BC National Award for Canadian Non-FictionAfflictions & Departures is a collection of first-person experiential essays. However, this is not the realm of traditional memoir—in addition to incidents and feelings recaptured from memory, Sonik seeks out connections between the microcosm of the daily events of her childhood and adolescence, and the...

Gripping at times, heartrending at others, What We All Long For is an ode to a generation of longing and identity, and to the rhythms and pulses of a city and its burgeoning, questioning youth.Dionne Brand's multicultural infusion follows the stories of a close circle of twenty-something second-generations living in downtown Toronto—and the secrets they hide from their families.Tuyen is a lesbian avant-garde artist and the daughter of Vietnamese pare...

WINNER of the 2013 Alberta Readers' Choice award!Rebee Shore’s life is fragmented. She’s forever on the move, ricocheting around Alberta, guided less than capably by her dysfunctional mother Elizabeth.The Shore Girl follows Rebee from her toddler to her teen years as she grapples with her mother’s fears and addictions, and her own desire for a normal life. Through a series of narrators—family, friends, teachers, strangers, and Rebee herself—her family’s dark past, ...

It is the end of the First World War, and thirteen-year-old Meredith yearns to become a teacher. But she must leave school to help support her family, moving to the city to work as a maid in a wealthy doctor's home. As the deadly Spanish Flu sweeps across the city, members of the household fall ill one by one. With the doctor working night and day at the hospital, only Meredith and the doctor's children, Maggie and Jack, are left to care for them. Every day the newspapers’ lists of “Yester...

Written in his mother’s unique voice, John Leigh Walters pushes the boundaries of memoir in A Very Capable Life, the extraordinary journey of a seemingly ordinary woman.Zarah Petri was a child when her family left Hungary to establish a new life in Canada in the 1920s. With courage and innovation, Zarah and her family survived the Depression?even if it meant breaking the law to do so. In celebrating Zarah Petri, A Very Capable Life pays homage to all “ordinary” women of the early twentieth...

The award-winning Indigenous author of Monkey Beach shares tales from her family, her life, and her culture.In March 2010 the Canadian Literature Centre hosted award-winning novelist and storyteller Eden Robinson at the 4th annual Henry Kreisel Lecture. Robinson shared an intimate look into the intricacies of family, culture, and place through her talk, "The Sasquatch at Home." Robinson's disarming honesty and wry irony shine through her depictions of her a...

Marilyn Dumont's Metis heritage offers her challenges that few of us welcome. Here she turns them to opportunities: in a voice that is fierce, direct, and true, she explores and transcends the multiple boundaries imposed by society on the self. She mocks, with exasperation and sly humour, the banal exploitation of Indianness, more-Indian-than-thou oneupmanship, and white condescension and ignorance. She celebrates the person, clearly observing, who defines her own life. These are Indian po...

Since its first publication in 1985, The Grey Islands has become a classic of Canadian wilderness writing to set beside the works of Thoreau, Annie Dillard and Aldo Leopold. Using a broad range of forms and styles - lyric, anecdote, field notes, documents and pseudo-documents, ghost story, tall tale - Steffler relates the story of one man's pilgrimage to a remote island of Newfoundland's northern peninsula. Often comic, and always deeply passionate and sensuous, The Grey Islands tells of t...

Beginning in 1946, Elizabeth Hawley worked for Fortune magazine as a researcher. Shortly thereafter, she left both her job and the United States itself to travel the world, and thus began her lifelong attraction to the exotic and remote sovereign state of Nepal. In the years that followed, she began reporting on the political and cultural events taking place in her adopted homeland for the likes of Reuters and Time Inc., letting the world in on the strange community of mountaineers, pilgri...