BC Books From Vancouver Island & the Coast

In the second volume of her Hannah trilogy, summer has arrived, and fourteen-year-old Hannah Anderson is excited about spending it with Max (who has been giving her stomach butterflies lately). But things are happening in Cowichan Bay that Hannah can’t explain. When a mysterious accident leads her to a nest of starving eaglets, she meets Izzy Tate, a young Metis girl staying in the village for the summer. Why is Izzy so angry all the time, and is it just a coincidence that she is the spitting …

When twelve-year-old Hannah uncovers an ancient Salish spindle whorl hidden in a cave near her home in Cowichan Bay, she is transported back to a village called Tl'ulpalus, in a time before Europeans had settled in the area. Through the agency of a trickster raven, Hannah befriends Yisella, a young Salish girl, and is welcomed into village life. Here she discovers that the spindle whorl is the prize possession of Yisella's mother, Skeepla, a famous spinner and weaver. When Skeepla falls victim t …

"Merv Wilkinson and Wildwood, his small patch of forest, provide powerful evidence that a forest can be logged while its integrity is maintained in perpetuity. In speaking out against current industrial clear-cut logging practices, Merv has become a genuine Canadian hero. Uncompromising, tough, fearless and with a wonderful sense of humour, he is now an elder who inspires young people, who refer to his home as "Mervana." This is a story that should be read by all who care about the future and s …

Hughina Harold paints a powerful picture of a world that no longer exists in this compelling account of her experiences as a young teacher and nurse on the remote Broughton Archipelago on British Columbia's coast in the 1930s. Fresh from nursing school in Victoria and eager to start work, Harold could not have imagined the challenges that awaited her in the tiny village of Mamalilikulla. Leaving the comforts of Victoria behind for a cold, leaky floathome that she shared with two elderly missiona …

On January 22, 1979, an eleven-year-old Native girl died of a ruptured appendix in an Alert Bay, B.C. hospital. The events that followed are chronicled here by Dara Culhane Speck, a member by marriage of the Nimpkish Indian Band in Alert Bay. She has relied mainly on interviews, anecdotes and public records to describe how this small, isolated Native community took on the local hospital, the College of Physicians and Surgeons, provincial and federal ministries of health and national media, becau …

Originally published in 1998, this updated edition has a brand-new cover and interior design, with a new foreword by Alexandra Morton.

Billy Proctor was born in 1934 and has spent his entire life in a remote coastal community called Echo Bay, BC on an island off northern Vancouver Island. Proctor has always done the time-honoured work of generations of upcoast men—hand-logging, fishing, clam digging, repairing boats, beachcombing.

But Billy eventually began to notice that the thriving runs of Pa …

In the early 1980s, Yvonne Maximchuk, a single mother of two, was living in Whiterock, BC, and making a living as a working artist and art instructor. Then she fell in love with Albert, a crab fisherman who fished the waters of Boundary Bay. Drawn to his seemingly idyllic life and her desire for connection with the natural world, Yvonne and her children moved with Albert to Echo Bay, a tiny settlement east of Vancouver Island.

Life in this remote community was a lot different from life in the cit …