BC Books From Vancouver Island & the Coast

An in-depth look at the life and career of retired judge and conflict-of-interest commissioner Ted Hughes, whose unflinching integrity earned him the reputation as Canada’s moral compass.

Throughout his sixty-year career, Ted Hughes has been a model of ethical conduct in the Canadian judicial system. The son of immigrant homesteaders who grew up in Saskatoon during the Depression, he might have retired as a respected senior judge in the town where he was born had his career not been sideswiped …

A richly illustrated exploration of the art, life, and historical impact of artist Frederick Whymper, who documented the landscape of the North American west.

Before the advent of photography, the topography of the colonial North American landscape was recorded by travelling artists hired to reproduce what they saw with unadulterated realism. One of these artists was British-born Frederick Whymper, a young man whose honest vitality and unabashed worldview are evident in work he leaves behind.

Thro …

Longlisted, 2018 Leacock Medal for Humour

A hilarious collection of Jack Knox's best-loved humour columns.

In this side-splitting follow-up to the bestseller Hard Knox: Musings from the Edge of Canada, Jack Knox presents his best writing, marking his twenty-year anniversary as a humour columnist at the Victoria Times Colonist, the newspaper that made him a household name. Revisiting his most—and least!—popular columns, Knox weighs the potential benefits of a marijuana-like drug that reduces an …

A young Canadian spitfire pilot finds adventure, love, and a remarkable dose of luck on the frontlines of the Second World War.

Rejected by the Royal Canadian Air Force in the summer of 1939, Keith “Skeets” Ogilvie joined the British Royal Air Force instead. A week later he was on a boat to England and a future he could not have imagined.

As a Spitfire pilot in the Battle of Britain, Skeets established his credentials with six confirmed victories and several enemy aircraft damaged. On leave i …

Malcolm Bidwell is young, smart, and ambitious--and he's just been hired by mistake by newly elected Premier Steven Davis as his "go-to guy" for every political mess that needs cleaning up. And there are plenty of messes--from a cabinet minister caught in a vice sting to the premier's animal cruelty charge for killing a crow. Negotiating his way through the treacherous and wickedly funny corridors of power, Malcolm is forced to make difficult choices: between what's right and what's expedient, a …

Five minutes. That's all it takes for Sylvia to fulfill a life's ambition and simultaneously blast fracture lines through her most important relationships.

Sylvia, fourteen, rides her horse in a cross-country competition, proving herself as an athlete, despite being an undeveloped shrimp with Turner Syndrome.

Unfortunately, her coach is furious that Sylvia rode too fast, and her cousin considers her irresponsible. Her mother would prefer that Sylvia focus on her health, start hormone treatment and …

Susan Telfer's intense poems in Ghost Town are possessed of a wild brilliance all their own. There is a raw, unruly, exhumed energy coming to the surface of these poems, which is the source of their power. This book's themes are identity, a struggle for self, invention and re-invention, against the undertow of family dysfunction, of ancestral influences, of grief and loss. They are rooted in the West Coast, explicitly located on the fault line as well as in dreams. Sometimes poetic forms offer t …

Waiting for the Albatross is Sandy Shreve's fifth collection of poetry. It features found poems composed using fragments from a diary her father, Jack Shreve, wrote in 1936 when, at age 21, he embarked overseas as a deck hand on a freighter. The five-month trip took him from Halifax, through the Panama Canal and across the Pacific to New Zealand and Australia; then back again, docking at Montreal. Shreve's poems are illustrated with photos from the journey, taking the reader into the life of a y …