BC Books From Vancouver Island & the Coast

A stunning retrospective highlighting the playfulness, power, and subversive spirit of Northwest Coast Indigenous artist Sonny Assu.

Through large-scale installation, sculpture, photography, printmaking, and painting, Sonny Assu merges the aesthetics of Indigenous iconography with a pop-art sensibility. This stunning retrospective spans over a decade of Assu’s career, highlighting more than 120 full-colour works, including several never-before-exhibited pieces.

Through analytical essays and per …

A former Olympic rower reflects on his evolution from ultra-competitive athlete to supportive coach and offers his game-changing thoughts on achieving success.

Once the embodiment of an aggressive athlete, Jason Dorland used to identify himself according to the results of his competitions—winner or loser. The elite rower was raised with an “in-it-to-win-it” attitude and was trained to think of every competitor as an enemy. It took a devastating loss at the 1988 Olympic Games to shatter this …

An insightful look at the first mayor of Nanaimo, BC, drawing heavily on his prolific and insightful written observations.

Mark Bate, elected Nanaimo’s first mayor in 1875, was a renaissance man. He loved music, writing, literature, the outdoors, community affairs, and of course politics. Bate served as mayor for sixteen terms—most by acclamation. He retired three times, returning to office after being persuaded to serve again.

Historian Jan Peterson skillfully weaves Bate’s own writing—in …

The fascinating and heartbreaking account of the first publicly exhibited captive killer whale — a story that forever changed the way we see orcas and sparked the movement to save them

Killer whales had always been seen as bloodthirsty sea monsters. That all changed when a young killer whale was captured off the west coast of North America and displayed to the public in 1964. Moby Doll — as the whale became known — was an instant celebrity, drawing 20,000 visitors on the one and only day he wa …

The fascinating and heartbreaking account of the first publicly exhibited captive killer whale—a story that forever changed the way we see orcas and sparked the movement to save them.

Killer whales had always been seen as bloodthirsty sea monsters. That all changed when a young killer whale was captured off the west coast of North America and displayed to the public in 1964. Moby Doll—as the whale became known—was an instant celebrity, drawing twenty thousand visitors on the one and only …

One woman’s shocking diagnosis with hepatitis C, her search for the cause, and her miraculous cure.

Was it wild parties and rough sex, a blood transfusion after childbirth or after a horrific accident involving a group of bikers, or perhaps some other event during the freewheeling 1960s and early 1970s that funneled the demon into her blood? Regardless, decades later, on the verge of cirrhosis, Elizabeth Rains had to confront the fact that she was infected with hepatitis C, often a death senten …

”To give a feeling of Christopher Gudgeon’s new collection, let’s turn to the story that gives the book its name. In The Widow Soré, the title character finds among her deceased fiancé Guillermo’s papers what appears to be a stack of letters. Titled The Encyclopedia of Lies, the letters recount the romantic, outsized exploits of another Guillermo, or one whom Isabel takes to be another Guillermo, because this must be a work of fiction, unless. Isabel travels to visit another woman who …

New poetry written by prize-winning BC poets, musicians, and artists such as Bruce Cockburn, Brian Brett and Lorna Crozier, anthologized by Victoria's city poet-laureate. While in the world of politics there are still climate change deniers, the poets watch the warming seas, the dying birds slicked in oil, the whales, the jellies, the sea otters and the octopus. They stand, as close to the shore as possible, watch the slow turning tide. In this collection of poems from the coast of B.C., Califor …