In The Bear's House / Bruce Hunter

ISBN 978-088982-253-5 • pb • 432 pp • $22.95 • Novel • June 2009

Part fictional memoir, part social history, In the Bear’s House details the lives of two Scottish immigrant families — the Dunlops and Lockies — in Calgary as they raise a deaf child.

The novel opens when seventeen-year-old Clare Dunlop gives birth to a son while her husband serves a penitentiary sentence for a serious crime. Clare Dunlop's own dreams as a gifted student are now thwarted. She turns her creative and brooding spirit to her family, raising her deaf son and four other children against the odds of poverty and depression. The deaf boy's ninety-nine-year-old great-great-aunt gives him a conch shell she brought overland to Alberta by ox cart and stagecoach before the railway. It becomes a kind of hearing aid in which he hears not the sea, but the stories of those around him.

Nicknamed Trout for his family’s love of the wild and his own attachment to the watery and silent world of fishes, he is traumatized at the death of his aunt and spirals out of control. His mother, who is pregnant with her sixth child, wavers between depression and clarity, and can no longer cope with Trout. She sends him to live with relatives in the wilderness. There he thrives, emerging from the claustrophobic and ironically noisy world of deafness, finding love, connection and belonging with his partially deaf, forest ranger great-uncle and his musician wife.

Trout discovers that while he can not always hear the world, he can feel it and he can learn to listen for its rhythms.

Bruce Hunter is the author of three books of poetry and a collection of short stories. Deafened as an infant, he worked in blue-collar jobs for nearly fifteen years, including variously as a labourer, Zamboni driver and gardener before and after attending Malaspina College. In his late twenties, he studied with W.O. Mitchell at the Banff School of Fine Arts and attended York University.

For the past twenty years, he has taught English and Liberal Studies at Seneca College as well as stints teaching Creative Writing at the Banff Centre and York University. In 2002, he was the Writers’ Guild of Alberta’s Writer in Residence at the Banff Centre. In the fall of 2007, he was Writer in Residence for the Richmond Hill Public Library.

"Bruce Hunter writes with bold restraint and a poet’s sensibility. His blue collar characters walk the tight line of their lives into the common universe that includes us all."
—Wayson Choy, Saturday Night

Far From Botany Bay / Rosa Jordan

ISBN 978-088982-249-8 • 372 pp • $22.95 • pb • September 2008 • Novel

At age 21, Mary Broom was sentenced to hang for the crime of stealing a cloak. When her sentence was commuted to transportation "upon the sea, beyond the seas," she was sent to Australia. One of the first European women to set foot on the continent, she landed in what was to become a prison colony popularly known as "Botany Bay." Mary endured two "starvation years" as the colony struggled to feed itself. Then, in 1791, she executed the most daring escape ever attempted from that wild and brutal place on the far side of the world.

How such a young, uneducated woman could have developed a plan to get herself back to England, and found the courage to implement it, is a mystery. How she persuaded eight men to accept her leadership is more mysterious yet. Her story has been told before, in history and fiction, the two generally co-mingled, as they are here. But never has the nature of this remarkable woman been so completely explored. What combination of physical endurance, psychological daring, natural intelligence, and trust in her own intuition made it possible for Mary Broom to succeed at the kind of escape that almost always ended in death for those who attempted it? And what does her story say about how much female liberation and equality have been advanced by women who never considered the concept, only its absolute necessity?

Rosa Jordan is an internationalist who explores the world physically and intellectually, always probing for the point at which political and social realities intersect with personal courage and compassion. After a decade of freelance reportage, she authored the autobiographical Dangerous Places: Travels on the Edge. Then she embarked on a series of children's books set in Florida, one of which has been made into a movie. Next she set out to cycle Cuba's 4000-km coastline, which resulted in Cycling Cuba, which she co-authored with her partner, Derek Choukalos. For Jordan, writing is the link between the edgy places she is drawn to and what she considers a truly idyllic home life in the Monashee Mountains of British Columbia. For the past decade, she has been social justice program director for Earthways Foundation, which has supported her in developing a jungle cat reserve in Ecuador's Choco rainforest and a food security program in a war-ravaged Mayan village in the Guatemala highlands.

Jordan's book, Lost Goat Lane, was nominated for the 2006-07 Chocolate Lily Award, and she was a finalist for the 2005 Silver Birch Award and the 2005 Red Maple Award.

Renovating Heaven / Andreas Schroeder
ISBN 978-088982-248-1• 204 pp • $18.95 • pb • September 2008 • A Novel in Triptych

Hilarious, bizarre and heart-breaking by turns, these three novellas of Mennonite life in Canada from the 1950s to the 1970s fill in the gap between Rudy Wiebe's Of This Earth (a generation older) and Miriam Toews' A Complicted Kindness (a generation younger).

Leaving Germany with little more than their 16th century Anabaptist faith and lifestyle to guide them, Schroeder's family settles on a small Fraser Valley farm in British Columbia and proceeds to try making sense of the perplexing mores and values of "The English" who surround them. The family finds solace, but not much else, within the local Mennonite congregation founded by Schroeder's grandfather, every single one of whose 62 members is related to Schroeder on his mother's side. In more forgiving times, these stories might have been described as entirely autobiographical. However, given today's more stringent standards — not to mention Schroeder's enthusiastic dedication to all the elements of effective storytelling (or, as his siblings would have it, "inclination to rampant lying and exaggeration") — Schroeder has raised the white flag and called these stories "novellas". That should go some distance to protecting the guilty and mollifying the innocent — if such there be.

Andreas Schroeder is the author of twenty books of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, translations, journalism and literary criticism. His books have won or been shortlisted for many awards including the Governor-General's Award, the Sealbooks First Novel Award, the Stephen Leacock Award, the Arthur Ellis Award for Best Non-Fiction and the Red Maple Award. For his literary journalism he was shortlisted for a National Magazine Award, and won the Canadian Association of Journalists' Best Investigative Journalism Award. He received an Honourary Doctorate of Letters from the University College of the Fraser Valley in 2002. He currently holds the Rogers Communications Chair in Creative Nonfiction in the University of British Columbia's Creative Writing Program. He lives in Roberts Creek on BC's Sunshine Coast with his wife, Sharon Oddie Brown.

"A brilliant saga of the dust-bedevilled thirties on the prairies; a powerful portrait of an irascible, heroic man, part prophetic genium, part damaged outcast, and his impossible, magnificent dream."
— Margaret Laurence.

" What Schroeder has accomplished is, quite simply, magical."
— Timothy Findley

A Song For My Daughter / Patricia Jean Smith

ISBN 978-088982-244-3 • 460 pp • $22.95 • pb • April 2008 • Novel

A Song for My Daughter, set in British Columbia in 1988, is an entrancing novel about transformation, healing and the irresistible magic inherent in telling stories. Vivian, the Old Woman who narrates the story, is a trickster figure with all the powers of Raven and all the savvy of a Greek chorus. We first meet Vivian by her favourite fishing hole. With her we enjoy the taste of freshly-caught salmon cooked over an open fire, take a sip of a cold beer and listen to her stories. With Vivian as our guide, we follow the adventures of three women—Joan Dark, the mysterious and radiant Salmon Woman and daughter of Vivian; Mary Chingee, a Carrier-Sekani woman, estranged from her family; and Sally Cunningham, the spoiled daughter of wealthy Vancouver socialites. Recently released from a mental institution, this unlikely trio journeys upriver into the heartland of BC in the hope of returning Mary to her ancestral home. Along the way, they meet, amongst others, cowboys, a revivalist preacher, a woman who runs a guest ranch and an old man without a shadow. Their exploits help us to discover what it means to be female at the end of the millennium, how it feels to be a marginalised minority and what it takes to rebalance the world.

Adam Rivers, the Head Psychiatrist of the Fraserview Institute, also joins the story, first as a sympathetic advisor to the three women and then as the author of his own journal in which he records his conflicting and confused feelings. Since his first meeting with Joan, he has become obsessed by his memories of her, by the voices he has begun to hear and by her continuing appearance in his dreams. He finds himself in a state of desire and longing that is contrary to all the rules of his profession, and yet he gives in to a spell that not only lifts him out of his own loneliness but leads him to a suprising revelation.

Beautifully imagined and written, A Song For My Daughter takes us on a multilayered and celebratory journey of love and survival. Through a collision of cultures, western and First Nations, the world is righted, as it must be if we are to survive and live in harmony and peace.

Patricia Jean Smith holds an MA from the University of British Columbia in Comparative Religions. She is the author of The Golf Widow’s Revenge, a humorous book on golf, and Double Bind, a novella. She lives on Vancouver Island.

“A Song for My Daughter is a daring story of love and transformation. Patricia Jean Smith is at the top of her novelistic form. She finds, in her British Columbia landscapes, those special animal/human places where ancient mythologies coincide with the contemporary world.”
– Robert Kroetsch

A Crack In The Wall / Betty Jane Hegerat

ISBN 978-088982-240-5 • 220 pp • $18.95 • pb • April 2008 • Short stories

The characters in A Crack in the Wall share a strong sense of home, whether it is a lifelong sanctuary, or a shell as fragile as the person who inhabits it. A young kleptomaniac ventures outside the shaky walls of her self-imposed confinement. A middle-aged woman pragmatically disposes of a houseful of pets in Calgary before returning to the Maritimes to embark on the next phase of her life. An elderly woman is forced to share her room in a nursing home with an old enemy. The stories explore the vastly different ways in which people deal with blows to the foundations of their lives, with loss. In the title story, A Crack in the Wall, a perfect home fractures after the death of a child. And in another, a grieving husband finds the house haunted by ghostly messages attached to the frozen meals left behind by his dying wife. These are ordinary people, abundantly flawed, often recognizing, but still clinging to their weaknesses.

A Crack in the Wall takes the reader on a voyeuristic walk down suburban streets, a glimpse into open windows at people yearning for what was, and making their reluctant peace with what is, and what will be. Betty Jane Hegerat has been a social worker, a teacher, a writer, and a student in UBC’s creative writing program. Her short fiction has been published in Canadian literary magazines and anthologies, and broadcast on CBC radio. Her first novel, Running Toward Home, was published in 2006. She is an Alberta writer with a deep love of the landscape of that province, both urban and rural, and gratitude for the small town origin that has given her the conviction that there are no “ordinary” lives.

“Betty Jane Hegerat is a gifted and compelling storyteller. She deals in ordinary people who lead ordinary lives, but by some unobtrusive narrative magic, her people become extraordinary.”
–David Carpenter.

Shirin and Salt Man / Nilofar Shidmehr

ISBN 978-088982-246-7 • 160 pp • $17.95 • pb • April 2008 • Poetic Novella

Shirin and Salt Man is a novella in verse, which tells the story of a young modern day Iranian woman, Shirin. She is an ordinary girl from Kermanshah born before the Islamic Revolution, who imagines herself to be an incarnation of princess Shirin, depicted in the ancient Persian classic Shirin and Khosro. At first she tries to shape her life to that of the myth, but later decides to change her destiny and become the author of her own story. She leaves her husband and runs away with the Salt Man, a 1700 year old mummy on display at the Iranian National Museum in Tehran. The poems form a compelling narrative of the life of a contemporary Iranian woman whose voice has been muted by Khosro, her fundamentalist and traditional husband. In an environment where the dominance of men is written in stone and where only men have the authority for fashioning and telling stories, Shirin reclaims a place for herself as a lover and teller of stories. She re-enters life through cracks of narrative to invent Shirin anew, one whose life-path radically diverges from that of her namesake, Shirin of Nezami’s story. She digs out Farhad, the mythical lover of princess Shirin, who has now become the Salt Man, from under the dust and stones of history and she gives him another opportunity to love her. In transforming Salt Man to another Farhad, Shirin creates a new history—one shaped and narrated by a feminine voice.

Nilofar Shidmehr was born and raised in Iran, and has lived in Canada since 1997. She holds an MFA degree in creative writing from the University of British Columbia and is currently working on her PhD at the Center for Cross Faculty Inquiry in Education. Her work has been featured in both Iranian and Canadian literary magazines, including Descant, A Room of One's Own, West Coast Line, Galleon, and the Shahrvand, a widely-read Iranian newspaper published in Toronto and Vancouver.

Incidental Music / Carol matthews

ISBN 0-88982-234-4 • ISBN13 978-088982-234-4 • 208 pp $19.95 • pb • September 2007 • Short Stories

“There has to be give and take in a marriage,” Tannis’s father tells her when she becomes engaged. “You’ll find the lasting value of a marriage appears not at the beginning but later, towards the end. It is a journey, not a destination. And it’s how you travel, day by day, that makes the difference.” The seven linked stories comprising Incidental Music show Tannis facing the contretemps of maturity, mid-life, aging and abandonment. Set in Montreal, Vancouver and Vancouver Island, these stories trace the geographic and emotional journeys of Tannis and her husband, Stephen, as they negotiate the day-to-day twists, turns, impasses and throughways of their domestic and work lives.

Incidental Music covers a range of life situations in which women struggle to make the choice that is right and good. An approaching marriage presents tensions between a future husband and an eccentric father; a woman has to choose between the worlds of her daily psychoanalysis and her domestic relationship; an aging voice artist opts to leave her day-trading fiancée. Music runs through these stories, in title, theme and event, suggesting the line between the remembered past and the unknown future: “Shhh,” says one character, “listen to the music. Just follow it, one note at a time.” Poignant, humorous, these compassionate stories are also concerned with the larger social landscape. Underlying each one is a sense of hope and a belief in people and in the bonds that unite them.

Carol Matthews was born in Vancouver and, after living in Montreal and Nanaimo, has settled on Protection Island. A writer and consultant, she has worked as a hospital social worker, executive director of a family organization, and as a college instructor and administrator. Her articles have appeared in a number of educational and literary publications and in anthologies. She is a regular book reviewer for Event Magazine and The Malahat Review, and writes a quarterly column for The Relational Journal of Child and Youth Care.

“When stories are told wisely and with compassion for the characters, we are drawn in by them as we are by a good teacher: willingly and with a desire to hear more. In this quietly assured début collection, Carol Matthews leads us artfully into the lives of Tannis and Stephen, Caitlin and Paul, Diane and Warren, Frances and David, couples who cope with their past, with the darkness that looms, pausing often to contemplate the joys that stay with them: food, sex, friends, art and the sweet familiarity of the music they have always loved. What we come away with is rich. What we come away with is true.”
— Terence Young.

The Year I Got Impatient / Valerie Stetson

0-88982-238-7 • 160 pp • $18.95 • pb • April 2007 • Fiction/Short Stories

A tragic accident leads to a disastrous love affair. A midlife crisis leads a man to trespass in a private pool. A marriage is torn apart when the husband becomes manic depressive. This collection of stories follows men and women in different walks of life while they cope with the events, good and bad, that shape them. In many ways, these stories look at how people bridge the differences between them, whether their differences are of race, culture, age or sensibility. These are stories of people in transition and an account of how they face everything from unlucky twists of fate to their own personal demons.

In these eight stories, the reader encounters a variety of characters: an auto body painter turned manic depressive, an unhappy art gallery owner who trespasses into a private pool in order to recapture his joie de vivre, a bitter, aged mother whose daughter suddenly redefines her sense of duty, an arrogant Czech engineer who is brought to her knees by an unexpected love affair. From the desperate to the dashing, all are clouted by life’s vagaries. Whether the sorrows range from the tragic— a senseless death — to the absurd— choking down a plate-sized, clandestinely imported mushroom at a dinner party — no one escapes unscathed. As their tales unfold, some characters stumble into false moves, while others find a way to triumph over their circumstances.

Valerie Stetson’s fiction and poetry have appeared in numerous literary journals and three anthologies. In 2001, she received The Bronwen Wallace Award for her story: “The Year I Got Impatient.” Her articles have appeared in The Globe and Mail , The Toronto Star and The Times Colonist. She lives in Kelowna with her husband and two step-kids, and is currently writing a novel. The Year I Got Impatient is her first book.

The Blue Sky / Galsan Tschinag
Translated by Katharina Rout

0-88982-232-8 • 144 pp • $24.95 hc • September 2006

"The hero may be a simple shepherd boy, but his tale is nothing short of epic. With this novel, a Mongolian shaman had stepped onto the stage of world literature."
— Der Spiegel (Germany)

In the high Altai Mountains of northern Mongolia, the nomadic Tuvan people's ancient way of life collides with the pervasive influence of modernity as seen through the eyes of a young shepherd boy.

The confrontation comes in stages. First his older siblings leave the family yurt to attend a distant boarding school. Then the boy's grandmother dies, and with her the boy's connection to the tribes. But the greatest tragedy strikes when his dog, Arsylang—"all that was left to me"—dies after ingesting poison set out by the boy's father to protect his herd from wolves. "Why is it so?" he cries out in despair to the Heavenly Blue Sky, but he is answered only by the silence of the wind.

Rooted in the oral traditions of the Tuvan people and their epics, Galsan Tschinag weaves the timeless story of a boy poised on the cusp of manhood, and with it the tale of a people on the threshold of a vanishing way of life.

Galsan Tschinag was born in the High Altai Mountains in western Mongolia into a family of nomadic herders. His family belongs to the Tuvan people and traditionally held a position of wealth and leadership. Tschinag was trained as a shaman. As a young boy, he traveled to Leipzig where he studied German language and literature and began to write, mostly in German. He is the author of more than thirty books, mostly short fiction, novels, and poetry, published in Germany and Switzerland.

Tschinag has been awarded several German literary awards, including the Order of the Federal Republic of Germany, as well as a Danish literary award and the two highest orders of the Republic of Tuva. A film by Oscar-winner Florian Gallenberger, based on the Tuvinian Tale, is in the works.

"Tschinag's books have reached well beyond his native Altai mountains, and with good reason. They speak of a true partnership between people and nature, and in a language as clear and stark as the steppes." — Südwest Presse (Germany)

"Tschinag describes the strenuous days spent between the herd of sheep and the yurt with both affection and precision, and evokes the stunning landscape in a particularly memorable way, all of it contributing to the unlikely sense one has as a reader that we are remembering our own childhood."— Die Welt (Germany)

Elliot & Me / Keith Harrison

0-88982-219-0 • 240 pp • $22.95 pb • March 2006

Elliot & Me is a tender, funny, moving double narrative about two people who don't understand each other. Elliot is a bright, reckless 17-year old who has just quit school late in his graduating year. Megan, his mother, is a woman who is haunted by the death of her father while she was "traipsing" through China, and is tired of being viewed as a beautiful work of art. The threatened return of Elliot's father, Jack, a huge American ex-ballplayer, causes Megan and Elliot to flee from their home in East Vancouver to Hornby Island.

Here, in an idyllic and very photogenic setting, this displaced odd couple — an angst-ridden, vibrant, self-destructive teenager and his inwardly questing mother whose physical loveliness makes her a target for other people's dreams — experience a highly consequential summer.

In a novel that is both a coming-of-age story and a portrait of the artist as a youngish, mesmerizing woman, both characters learn more than they want to about each other — and about themselves.

" The writing is beautiful and subtle and to me, very poetic."
– Marilyn Bowering.

Keith Harrison was born in Vancouver and studied at UBC, California (Berkeley), and McGill University, where he received his PhD for work on Malcolm Lowry. He is the author of three novels, Dead Ends, a finalist for the Best First Novel in Canada Award, After Six Days, and Eyemouth, shortlisted for a QSPELL Award. His collection of short stories, Crossing the Gulf, includes a piece that won the Okanagan Short Story Award. A non-foction novel, Furry Creek, was selected for the BC 2000 Award and nominated for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. He has edited an anthology of short fiction, Islands West: Stories from the Coast. He teaches at Malaspina University-College, and lives on Hornby Island, BC.

Silent Inlet / Joanna Streetly

0-88982-207-7 • 5½ x 8½ 450 pp • $22.95 • September 2005

Silent Inlet traces the lives of four very different characters in Hansen Sound, a fictional small-town on the west coast of Vancouver Island. Amidst storms, mist and rain, they find themselves thrown together, struggling to trust one another. When a violent accident injures a handicapped boy, the tentative relationships that they have established begin to fall apart. Chaos ensues and lives begin to unravel.

Harry Farre is a feisty woman in her sixties, who lives primitively on an island in the middle of Hansen Sound. Her daughter, Hannah, is returning to the Sound in the aftermath of a failed relationship. Big Mack Stanley is a First Nations man in his late thirties, beset by the troubles of his upbringing. His orphaned nephew, Lonny, is ten years old, desperate for love and a place to belong. Each of these characters sees life without “seeing” each other, and the story is told in their interweaving voices and points of view.

Hesquiaht hereditary chief, Simon Lucas, once said: “You only see us with one eye.” This novel brings the west coast to life through a spectrum of perspectives within which the reader experiences the raw physicality of people and place: people who are caught in the sea of turbulence, hardship and brilliance that characterizes the west coast, shaped by its history and the forces of Nature.

Joanna Streetly was born in Trinidad, W.I., and educated in England. She moved to the west coast of Vancouver Island in 1990, where she lives on a floathouse in Clayoquot Sound and works as a freelance writer, illustrator, editor and kayak guide. For seven years she was married to a Tla-o-qui-aht canoe carver, and forged many links to the local First Nations community.

The School At Chartres / David Manicom

0-88982-222-0 • 5½ x 8½ • 280 pp • $21.95 • June 2005

The School At Chartres combines the intrigue of a thriller with the sophistication of a major international literary work reminiscent of A. S. Byatt. Set partly in 1990s Montreal and partly in medieval France, The School At Chartres is a long love-letter—the final letter—from the protagonist, John Wilson, to his lost love.

In thirteenth century France, a catastrophic fire has destroyed the greatest shrine in Christendom. Out of the ashes of the tragedy, history leaves a shadowy tale of a miracle, of the resurrection of faith, and of reconstruction—the erection of the masterwork of Gothic architecture, the Cathedral at Chartres. At the time of the fire, a powerful visitor, Cardinal Melior from the Holy See, has just arrived to find a new core for his faith at the brilliant School located in the town.

A failed Montreal architect-turned-historian, John Wilson is convinced that by excavating the story of Chartres, by explaining its unparalleled complex beauty, he can heal something in his own life. And he is increasingly convinced that Cardinal Melior holds the key to his own personal dilemma.

As exquisitely woven as a medieval tapestry, The School At Chartres will appeal to readers of literary mysteries, such as Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and A. S. Byatt’s Possession.

David Manicom grew up in rural Ontario, has lived in Moscow, Islamabad, and Beijing, and now lives with his family in Quebec. He is the author of three acclaimed collections of poetry, a collection of short stories which won the Prix Parizeau, and an award-winning non-fiction title, Progeny of Ghosts: Travels In Russia and The Old Empire. His latest book of poems, The Burning Eaves, was short-listed for the 2004 Governor General’s Award.

Love In A Time Of Terror / Ulla Berkéwicz

0-88982-215-8 • 5½ x 8½ • 204 pp • $19.95 • July 2005

Amsterdam during November. In the “Ural,” a Russian pub on the Amstel River, people meet who have been driven through space and time by the history of the 20th century and whose histories here become stories. The ‘Ural” is a magical place where they find refuge and witness a new story, the story of Alon and Olga. “I had noticed that they were looking at each other, had felt their eyes meet. And since then, I have asked myself the question about love as if it still concerned me.” The old woman Tatyana, Russian exile, owner of the pub “Ural,” tells this story that takes place over the course of nine days in a langauge that seems to have come to us from the Russia of Dostoyevsky.

Love in a Time of Terror is a novel about love and about a longing that knows no end. It is a spy novel, a thriller, about Islamic as well as Jewish fundamentalism, and about the war that Israeli fanatics and Arab extremists fight over a psycho-weapon. Though seemingly made for eternity, the enmity between the two political systems loses its relevance for Alon and Olga, the lovers from the two opposing camps, when they cautionsly begin to spell out the world anew and so perhaps begin to find the “missing letter” of the alphabet, the letter capable of transforming “oppression and hatred into freedom and love.”

“A metaphysical thriller that deals as much with the events in the Middle East, Islamic and Jewish fundamentalism, as it does with German history and the renunited Germany.”
—Uwe Sauerwein, Berliner Morgenpost

Ulla Berkéwicz was born in Gießen, Germany. She attended the Academy of Music in Frankfurt and for many years acted with the Münchner Kammerspiele and Hamburg Schauspielhaus, amongst others. She gave up acting in 1982 and since has published several novels, plays and books on policy issues. She lives in Frankfurt/Main where she is the publisher of the prestigious publishing house Suhrkamp Verlag.

Katharina Rout studied German and English literature and received her Ph.D. from the Univerity of Munster. She teaches English and German literatures at Malaspina University-College in Nanaimo, BC.

New Format Reprint.

Illustrated by Lissa Calvert

0-88982-149-6 • 5½ x 8½ • 72 pp • $9.95 • March 2005

Emily Carr, an artist who is very fond of animals, has traded a puppy for a two-year-old Javanese monkey. Emily’s sisters disapprove of this new pet, but Emily is determined to keep the monkey, which she names “Woo” because of the sound it makes. Woo has many adventures (and gets into a lot of mischief) while she lives with Emily Carr. One day, Woo and Jane the parrot are left alone in the kitchen. When Woo finds herself free because her chain is not properly fastened, the monkey and parrot have a fight, and Emily comes home to find a huge mess.

Woo loves to go camping with Emily when she goes to the woods to paint. On one camping trip, Woo eats some of the artist’s green paint and becomes very ill. A boy finds her and helps to save the monkey’s life. When Emily becomes too old and sick to care for her pets, Woo is sent to Stanley Park Zoo in Vancouver. Will the other monkeys attack her or accept her as a friend? An old monkey grandmother settles the question.

Constance Horne lives in Victoria, BC. She is also the author of The Jo Boy Deserts & Other Stories, Nykola and Granny and Trapped by Coal.

Emily Carr’s Woo was short-listed for the Sheila A. Egoff Children’s Prize, B.C. Book Prizes.

Lissa Calvert is a Victoria wildlife artist who has illustrated many books.

Time's Reach / Rachel Wyatt

0-88982-205-0• 5½ X 8½ • 272 pp. $22.95 • 2003

When Robert Parkes reaches the end of his life, he is desperate to reveal to his daughter and his wife that he is not the ordinary man they assumed him to be. He has kept a secret about his participation in one of the most tormented times in human history, a secret that his children and grandchildren eventually must go on a journey to discover. Not only do they uncover his shadowed past, but they uncover the shadows within themselves.

With compassion, humour and stunning insight, Rachel Wyatt’s Time's Reach evokes the experiences and confused emotions of three generations of a family attempting to decipher the meaning of their shared past.

“Wyatt’s characters are profoundly real . . .” —Richard Jagodonski, The Calgary Herald

“Her writing is as socially mutinous as Carol Shields’s, as comedic as Jane Austen’s . . .” —Jacqueline Turner, Georgia Straight
 
“Rachel Wyatt brings her characters into places of change, places where reality and mind-world meet, and it’s a pleasure to join her there.” —Meg Walker, Globe and Mail
 
“. . . her masterful characterizations, technical agility with narrative time and staggering ability [secures] the reader’s undivided attention . . .” —Judith Fitzgerald, Globe and Mail
 
Rachel Wyatt was born in England and moved to Canada with her family in 1957. She is the author of four novels, two works of short fiction, and has written over a hundred radio dramas which have been produced by the CBC and BBC. She also writes for television and stage. Rachel served as Director of Writing at the Banff Centre for the Arts from 1991 to 1999. In 2002 she was awarded the Order of Canada. She lives with her husband, Alan, in Victoria, BC.

The Last We Heard of Leonard / Rachel Wyatt

$19.95 • ISBN 0-88982-210-7 • 5 ½ x 8 ½ • 208 pages

In this superb new collection of sixteen stories, Rachel Wyatt explores the convergence between reality and fantasy. It is a mysterious inner realm, perhaps best described by the word absence, that lies between what’s possible and the imagined, between the bizarre and the blurred edges of reality.

The mirror Wyatt holds up to reality reflects back an image puzzling and disturbing, invariably at odds with the image we have of ourselves. In stories that are often humorous and quirky, things are out of square, time slightly distorted, the world out of focus.

Islands West / Keith Harrison, ed.

$22.95 • ISBN 0-88982-198-4 • 5 ½ x 8 ½ • 420 pages

Islands West offers an exciting cross-section of contemporary story-telling from the BC coast.  Some of the stories gathered here are by famous writers like Jack Hodgins, Audrey Thomas, and Alice Munro; but many are by confident new voices, with new angles of vision, and compellingly different stories to tell.  Islands West catches this astonishing wave of emerging talent and covers the spectacular waterfront of BC short fiction now.

What Men Know About Women / Ron Smith

$17.95 • ISBN 0-88982-177-1 • 5 ½ x 8 ½ • 240 pages

In What Men Know About Women, Ron Smith explores the unspoken complications men and women experience in their most intimate relationships. As the space between them ebbs and flows, his couples struggle to maintain a balance between love and alienation, understanding and confusion, tenderness and a fear of vulnerability. Whether surreal or realistic, these stories are always spare and elegant. They are about the circumstances of everyday life, told with compassion.

Furry Creek / Keith Harrison

$17.95 • ISBN 0-88982-182-8 • 5 ½ x 8 ½ • 221 pages

A non-fiction novel, Furry Creek uses documents and made-up lies to narrate the art, life and violent death of Pat Lowther.

“This is a kind of magic trick on the part of Keith Harrison, a labour of love, a monument to a writer’s memory, to a writer who had a blunt domestic instrument laid to that delicate pink brain. Remember me, asks the uneasy ghost and Harrison remembers.” Mark Anthony Jarman, The Globe and Mail.

Seductions. / Marlene Streeruwitz

Translated by Katharina Rout

$19.95 • ISBN 0-88982-174-7 • 5 ½ x 8 ½ • 252 pages

“Seductions. is driver education life skills for the new age. . . . Venture on to this autobahn . . . the trip is exciting.” —J. M. Bridgeman, January Magazine “. . . exposes the quirky details that form the survival instincts of a woman, a mother, a lover. Our own needs can be nasty little things, but they are real.” —Andrea Blundell, Word. Marlene Streeruwitz lives in Vienna and has been honoured with several literary awards, among them the Österreichischer Würdigungspreis für Literature. Seductions. was originally published by Suhrkamp Verlag.

Breathing Under Water / Carol Windley

$21.95 • ISBN 0-88982-171-2 • 5 ½ x 8 ½ • 476 pages

Breathing Under Water takes place in the fictional town of Cayley, on Vancouver Island, where Arlene—middle-aged, married, adrift, and haunted by the past—feels trapped by the confines of her small town and longs for a richer life. Then she falls unexpectedly in love with her daughter’s high-school socials teacher—the same teacher her wilful and headstrong adolescent daughter has a crush on. “Here’s a deeply satisfying book that infiltrates Eden and doesn’t shrink from what it finds there.” —Frank Moher National Post

Crossing the Gulf / Keith Harrison

$15.95 • ISBN 0-88982-167-4 • 220 pp. • 5 ½ x 8 ½

“Dazzling short stories.” —Anne Moon Victoria Times-Colonist “‘Colour Bodies’...is witty, allusive and is clothed in stylistic complexity.” —Peter O’Brien, Globe and Mail.

Keith Harrison has published three novels and has composed more than a dozen ciné-fiches for the National Film Board of Canada. He teaches English and Creative Writing at Malaspina University-College, and lives on Hornby Island.