Book Passage

Take a trip on a BC Ferry this summer and discover a bounty of reading riches to while the time away. En route to Nanaimo, Prince Rupert, Haida Gwaii, or Vancouver, all 21 of the following BC books can be found aboard any ship with a Passages Gift Shop.

Book Passage with BC Books on BC Ferries

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Regional Interest

Discovery Passages

by Garry Thomas Morse, Talon Books, $17.95 PA

Retracing Captain George Vancouver’s original sailing route, Garry Thomas Morse sets out to recover the appropriated, stolen and scattered world of his ancestral people from Alert Bay to Quadra Island to Vancouver. These poems draw upon both written history and Kwakwaka’wakw First Nations tradition to reflect many respective stories of these communities.
www.talonbooks.com

Whoever Gives Us Bread: the Story of Italians in British Columbia

by Lynne Bowen, Douglas & McIntyre, $32.95 HC

Whoever Gives Us Bread is a lively people’s history from the 1860s to the 1960s, as told by an award-winning historian who spent ten years conducting interviews and combing through newspapers, government records and letters to write this definitive history.
www.dmpibooks.com

Working with Wool: A Coast Salish Legacy and the Cowichan Sweater

by Sylvia Olsen, Sono Nis Press, $38.95 PA

Cowichan sweaters, with their distinctive bands of design and untreated, handspun wool, have been a British Columbia icon since the early 20th century, but few people know the full story behind the garment. Sylvia Olsen tells the tale, drawing on her own experience, academic research, and her four-decade friendship with some of the Coast Salish women who have each knitted hundreds of sweaters.
www.sononis.com

Guide Books

Backyard Bounty: The Complete Guide to Year-Round Organic Gardening in the Pacific Northwest

by Linda Gilkeson, New Society Publishers, $24.95 PA

This practical guide is packed with simple, low-maintenance methods to produce the most organically grown food all year round from any home garden. With advice on soil preparation, composting, seeding, watering, mulching, pruning, winter crop planting schedules, greenhouses and more, Backyard Bounty will get you growing.
www.newsociety.com

Country Roads of Western BC: From the Islands to Fraser Valley

by Liz Bryan, Heritage House Publishing, $24.95

In her third book of off-the-beaten-track explorations of western Canada, Liz Bryan travels the scenic roads of BC’s Lower Mainland and Vancouver Island. From country routes in the Fraser Valley to forest roads leading to coastal settlements such as Zeballos and Telegraph Cove, these journeys celebrate the landscape and trace the early human history of these regions.
www.heritagehouse.ca

Secret Beaches of Central Vancouver Island: Campbell River to Qualicum

by Theo Dombrowski, Heritage House Publishing, $26.95 PA

The third book in the bestselling Secret Beaches series leads the explorer to a treasure trove of hidden beaches. Some are well known to locals, some are tucked just off the highway, and others can be found at the end of a labyrinth of roads, obscured by ancient forests. Whether you seek solitude, want to launch a kayak or simply to walk along acres of soft sand, this guide is for you.
www.heritagehouse.ca

Illustrated

Following the Last Wild Wolves

by Ian McAllister, Greystone Books, $19.95 PA

This is a textual edition of the bestselling photographic book is updated with the author’s recent observations of the wolves of the Great Bear Rainforest. It contains a sixteen-page photographic insert that includes spectacular new photographs.
www.dmpibooks.com

The Life and Art of Mildred Valley Thornton: #4 in the Unheralded Artists of BC Series

by Sheryl Salloum, Mother Tongue Publishing, $35.95 PA

Mildred Valley Thornton (1890-1967) was a highly spirited artist who
travelled throughout Western Canada painting landscapes and over 300 portraits of aboriginal peoples. This well researched and beautifully illustrated book celebrates her life as a journalist, poet, mother, art critic and advocate for First Nations and her art.
www.mothertonguepublishing.com

The Sea Wolves: Living Wild in the Great Bear Rainforest

by Ian McAllister & Nicholas Read, Orca Book Publishers, $19.95 PA

Living in the isolated wilderness of the Great Bear Rainforest, coastal wolves have also enjoyed a unique relationship with man. Illustrated with almost one hundred of Ian McAllister’s magnificent photographs, The Sea Wolves presents a strong case for the importance of preserving the Great Bear Rainforest for the wolves, the bears and the other unique creatures that live there.
www.orcabook.com

Children’s

No Time to Say Goodbye: Children’s Stories of Kuper Island Residential School

by Sylvia Olsen, Sono Nis Press, $9.95

Taken by government agents to live at Kuper Island Residential School, five children from the Tsartlip First Nation are isolated on the small island. They experience homesickness and confusion while trying to adjust to a completely different world. Despite the strict school routine, the children find adventure in escape, challenge in competition, and camaraderie with their fellow students.
www.sononis.com

The Secret Keepers

by Paul Yee, Tradewind Books, $12.95 PA

Set in San Francisco’s Chinatown before and after 1906, this novel portrays a young Jackson Leong coping with the ghost of his brother who died in the earthquake, as well as the mysterious ghost of a young woman. Jackson must find out the reasons why the ghosts are haunting the world of the living. If he fails his family will face ruin and disgrace.
www.tradewindbooks.com

Sound of the Ferry

by Sara Leach, Poppy Productions, $9.95 PA

Following up on their adventures in their bestseller Mountain Machines, author Sara Leach and illustrator Steven Corvelo board a ferry to explore the sounds and sights of a sea voyage. Full of detail, recurring characters and colourful marine life, this rhyming picture book takes children on an entertaining ferry ride.
www.poppyproductions.ca

Creative Non-Fiction

Afflictions & Departures: Essays

by Madeline Sonik, Anvil Press, $20.00 PA

Afflictions & Departures begins by considering the turbulent and changing nature of the world in the late 1950s and ealry 1960s —the world in which the author was conceived and born. Like many couples of that era, Sonik’s parents focused on shared social and economic ambitions at the expense of authentic personal feeling. These ambitions would erode and, by the 1970s, completely collapse
www.anvilpress.com

The House with the Broken Two: A Birthmother Remembers

by Myrl Coulter, Anvil Press, $18.00 PA

In The House with the Broken Two Dr. Myrl Coulter reflects on the family politics and social mores that surrounded closed adoption in the 1960s. She also examines the changing attitudes that resulted in the current open adoption system and her own eventual reunion with her firstborn son.
www.anvilpress.com

Subject to Change

by Renee Rodin, Talon Books, $18.95 PA

Composed of stories that sketch the resonant heights and depths of an autobiography, Subject to Change is a series of self-portraits along the road of a life well-lived. Each story is an articulate, intelligent, passionate record of how an encounter with a significant “other” has changed and shaped the humanity, character and community —the “subject”— of the writer.
www.talonbooks.com

Fiction

The Edward Curtis Project: A Modern Picture Story

by Marie Clements & Rita Leistner, Talon Books, $24.95 PA

Marie Clements’s play dramatizes the creation of Edward Curtis’s twenty-volume photographic and ethnographic record of the “vanishing” North American Indian. It is presented here alongside Rita Leistner’s parallel investigation of Curtis’s work, which questions the practice of documentary photography with the very medium under scrutiny with over 100 colour photographs.
www.talonbooks.com

Everything Was Good-Bye

by Gurjinder Basran, Mother Tongue Publishing, $21.95 PA

Everything Was Good-Bye is a vibrant and courageous story about a young Indo-Canadian woman growing up in the lower mainland of BC and her struggles as she asserts her independence in a Punjabi community. It is a modern story of love, loss and self-acceptance amidst shifting cultural ideals. Winner: Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize and the Search for the Great BC Novel Contest.
www.mothertonguepublishing.com

The Gate

by Michael Elcock, Oolichan Books, $18.95 PA

The Gate, a novel of simple but stunning beauty, takes the reader on a journey of love, terrible loss and survival. Amidst the horrors of war, two young lovers, one Canadian, one French, test their passion and will against the might of the German army.
www.oolichan.com

Made That Way

by Susan Ketchen, Oolichan Books, $12.95 PA

In this young adult novel, a stand-alone sequel to Born That Way, Sylvia explores herd dynamics, whether in family life, schoolyard politics, or in the stable. Sylvia’s misadventures are told with humour and compassion. When finally she gets her horse, he is as unique and spirited as she is.
www.oolichan.com

Spit Delaney’s Island

by Jack Hodgins, Ronsdale Press, $18.95 PA

Jack Hodgins’ first book, published originally in 1976, is back in print! Spit Delaney’s Island, a collection of short stories, set Hodgins off on his award-winning career and put Vancouver Island on the Canadian literary map. Hodgins brings Vancouver Island to life —touch, taste, and sound— in this acclaimed collection.
www.ronsdalepress.com

This Innocent Corner

by Peggy Herring, Oolichan Books, $19.95 PA

This Innocent Corner takes the reader from Bangladesh on the brink of war in the early 1970s to the shores of Salt Spring Island thirty years later. The story follows Robin who, as an exchange student visiting what was then East Pakistan, committed a well intentioned act that had devastating consequences.
www.oolichan.com