In a time when darkness covered the land, a boy named Weget is born who is destined to bring the light. With the gift of a raven's skin that allows him to fly as well as transform, Weget turns into a bird and journeys from Haida Gwaii into the sky. There he finds the Chief of the Heavens who keeps the light in a box. By transforming himself into a pine needle, clever Weget tricks the Chief and escapes with the daylight back down to Earth.Vividly portrayed through the art of Roy Hen...

Between 1959 and 1966, the late CBC Radio journalist Imbert Orchard travelled across British Columbia with recording engineer Ian Stephen interviewing nearly a thousand of the province’s pioneers. The resulting collection - 2,700 hours of audiotapes describing both extraordinary events and everyday experiences - is considered by historians to be one of the best sources of primary information about the province. To the general public, however, the tales in these tapes remain virtually unkno...

Cloudwalker, describing the creation of the rivers, is the second in a series of Northwest Coast legends by Roy Henry Vickers and Robert Budd. Their previous collaboration, Raven Brings the Light (2013), is a national bestseller.On British Columbia’s northwest coast lies the Sacred Headwaters-the source of three of British Columbia’s largest salmon-bearing rivers. These rivers are the source of life for all creatures in the area. But what gave life to the rivers t...

In a follow-up to his well-received Voices of British Columbia, Robert Budd returns with more captivating tales of the province’s pioneering past in the very words of the people who lived them.Between 1959 and 1966, the late CBC Radio journalist Imbert Orchard travelled across British Columbia with recording engineer Ian Stephen, conducting interviews with some of the province’s most remarkable and inspiring pioneers. The resulting collection contained 998 conversations to...

In 1897, tens of thousands of would-be prospectors flooded into the Yukon in search of instant wealth during the Klondike Gold Rush. In this historical tale of mayhem and obsession, characters like prospectors George Carmack and Skookum Jim, Skagway gangster Soapy Smith and Mountie Sam Steele come to life. Enduring savage weather, unforgiving terrain, violence and starvation, a lucky few made their fortune, and some just as quickly lost it. The lure of the North is still irresistible in th...

A joyous romp through the back pages of Canadian quirkiness, Canadian Folk provides a fresh look at the saints, sinners, oddballs, and outright nutbars who have populated the Canadian landscape.They were perpetually northbound or south; they were inveterate walkers, or world class runners, millionaires in ill-advised Citroen half-tracks. The restless characters who spanned those miles and who fill the pages of this book were fuelled by the ambitions, the doubts, and the ce...

This historically factual creative non-fiction book concerns a remarkable woman who married and moved to ‘New Ontario’ in 1907 to become an outstanding community member, one of the first women elected to a School Board in Ontario, and mother to eight children.More than mere history, this story recounts the difficulties with the mud, muskeg, mosquitoes and many other situations she dealt with to become a part of our history here in north-eastern Ontario. Diane Armstrong has taken her years ...

The view 16-year-old Thomas Osborne first had of Muskoka was at night, trudging alone with his even younger brother along unmarked primitive roads to find their luckless father who, in 1875, had decided to make a new start for his beleaguered family on some "free land" in the bush east of the pioneer village of Huntsville, Ontario. The miracle is that Thomas lived to tell the tale.For the next five years Thomas endured starvation, falling through the ice and freezing, accidents wit...

"Absolutely first-rate."—The New YorkerThis thrilling story is at once first-rate history and first-rate entertainment. Incredible events occurred in North America after a decrepit steamboat docked at Seattle in 1897 containing two tons of pure gold. So frenzied was the clash for gold and so scant was information about conditions in the Klondike that the rush for riches became a kind of fabulous madness. The entire tale—of which Pierre Berton's account is the definitive telling—has ...

A woman from Northern Ontario is buried; her earthly papers reveal a mystery. Veteran Canadian journalist Jim Poling took on the most important assignment of his career: Just who was his mother? Why did she take a lifelong secret to her grave?In his search for clues throughout his childhood years in Northern Ontario, the author goes to Chapleau, the railway town where the people he believed were his ancestors played out their roles in building the railway. It ends in the Prairie vi...

The legendary Canadian book editor presents this "remarkable, four-decade romp through the back rooms of publishing" ( Toronto Sun).Scottish-born Douglas Gibson was drawn to Canada by the writing of Stephen Leacock—and eventually made his way across the Atlantic to find a job in book publishing, where he edited a biography of none other than Leacock. But over the decades, his stellar career would lead him to work with many more of the country's leading lit...

Kirstine Stewart, the CBCs executive vice-president in charge of English programming, has the most difficult job in Canadian media. Up against huge budget cuts, the Internet, corporate media giants, and millions of taxpaying critics, she is fighting back with an array of mass-appeal reality TV and sitcoms such as Dragons' Den and Little Mosque on the Prairie . Ratings have never been higher; nevertheless, the CBC is on increasingly tenuous ground. Jason McBride went behind the scenes with Ste...