BC Books From the Mainland/Southwest

This home-grown history of a Vancouver neighbourhood speaks to the need people still have, in a time of infinite possibilities, to connect deeply with the place they call home. The Story of Dunbar is a celebration of community roots and a sense of place. The documentation of Dunbar's history, complete with archival photos from private collections, will resonate with those who live in neighbourhoods with stories waiting to be told.

The Story of Dunbar draws on interviews with more than 350 local r …

Homelessness is not new to Vancouver. There have been homeless people in Vancouver since it was founded in 1886. As in other major North American cities, until the late “70s and early “80s homelessness in Vancouver followed the economic logic of boom and bust capitalism.

However, since the run-up to the World Exposition of 1986, that logic has no longer been the determining factor influencing the growing number of homeless in the city. The “new poverty” that emerged in the 1980s is a prod …

Shortlisted for the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize

Excerpted in the Vancouver Sun

Vancouver is at a crossroads in its history--host to the 2010 Winter Olympics and home to the poorest neighbourhood in Canada; a young, multicultural city with a vibrant surface and a violent undercoat; a savvy urban centre with an inferiority complex.

In Vancouver Special, writer and performer Charles Demers examines the who, what, where, when, why, and how of Vancouver, shedding light on the various strategies and …

During the second half of the 19th century, thousands of Chinese men arrived on the west coast of North America, seeking to escape poverty and make their fortunes in the goldfields or working on the railroads. Among them was 36-year-old Yip Sang, a native of Guangdong province in southeast China, who arrived in Vancouver in 1881 after failing to strike it rich in California. His luck was about to change. Through perseverance, hard work and an eye for opportunity, the enterprising Yip Sang amasse …

For bpNichol, who called himself a “writer who writes about the act of writing,” criticism was not only a means to address his own poetics and the textual practices of his generation; it was just as essential to his imagination as were his poems themselves.

Finally, after years of readers struggling to find or access many of Nichol’s innovative critical writings, this much needed and anticipated volume makes it possible to follow Nichol through his thirty-year-long thoughtful engagement with …

This compelling biography of Doug Hepburn, the weightlifter who won gold for Canada in Stockholm in 1953 and at the British Empire Games in Vancouver in 1954, delivers fascinating, first-hand information about an unusual Vancouver athlete and the sporting world of the 1950s and 1960s. In this plain-spoken and moving biography of a strength legend, Tom Thurston captures the story of a Canadian who may have been the strongest man in history. The book traces Doug's rise to prominence, his temporary …

When Cassie comes to Vancouver from Australia for an intensive summer program at a prestigious ballet school, she finds it hard to fit in. A clique of girls who have been at the school a long time don't want the newcomers to get any attention. At first Cassie tries to go along to get along, but when she realizes that some of the visiting summer students are being bullied and threatened, and that she herself is being sabotaged, she finally speaks out—and finds out how far some girls will go to …

In this fast-paced novel for readers ten and up, James Graham, a Canadian journalist, is kidnapped in a market in Buenaventura, Colombia, right in front of Marco, his thirteen-year-old son. When the kidnappers try to grab Marco, his father yells at him, “Run Marco, run!” Marco manages to escape, and seeing no possibility of help in Colombia, he stows away on a freighter headed to Vancouver where a good friend of his father is living and who may be able to help. During his search, Marco encou …