Ronsdale Press

Two-and-a half millennia after it was created, Homer's Odyssey remains one of humanity's most memorable adventure stories. In this re-creation of Homer's classic as a young adult novel, we see the aftermath of the Trojan War through the eyes of Alexi, a fifteen-year-old Trojan boy. Orphaned by the war and enslaved by Odysseus himself, Alexi has a very different view of the conquering heroes of legend. Despite a simmering anger towards his captors, Alexi gradually develops a grudging respect for them. As the Greeks fight off the angry Cicones, weather a storm that pushes them far beyond charted waters, and nearly succumb to the blandishments of the bewitching Lotus-eaters, he realizes that they are not the demons they were said to be, but people like himself.

Alan Twigg has here recovered the amazing story of how George and Ingeborg while travelling in northern India in 1961 encountered many of the Tibetan refugees who had fled over the mountain passes. Appalled by the condition of the children, huddled together with inadequate bedding, surviving on a diet of thin soup and momos, steamed dumplings of mixed wheat and corn flour, they expressed their desire to help. "You must absolutely come and see uncle," said a young girl. This was Khando Yapshi, the Dalai Lama's niece. Among the first Westerners to meet with the Dalai Lama, the Woodcocks vowed to provide humanitarian assistance. This was was the genesis for the Tibetan Refugee Aid Society (TRAS), one of two remarkable non-profit charities spearheaded by the Woodcocks. Since 1962, TRAS has raised over $500,000 and has undertaken 300 projects. Both of the Woodcocks' volunteer-based low-overhead organizations are still going strong today.

In this superb new collection of poetry, Antony Di Nardo explores the interplay between a disintegrating natural world and the human observer, a relationship characterized by both beauty and terror. "A talking tree, a talking tree / in the language of dead leaves" ends a poem in the award-winning suite, "May June July," where cancer cells are constellations and gardens a "photosynthetic success." This is poetry with an ear to the ground, an ear for the unexpected. Partly feral, partly tamed and sometimes formal, the poems in Skylight illuminate shadows in the rough and clarify the spark found between observer and observed. The subjects roam: birdlife, clouds and cities, still lives, the sign of the Crab, small rooms, food courts, the skylight above a bed. In Di Nardo's hands, these are both objects and ideas that words manipulate to create an aesthetic that privileges artifice and revels in its syntax, image, and element of surprise. The poetry both entertains and acknowledges what words can do, like nothing else can, to create experience and bear witness. Trees dominate, a fool hen comes crashing into a house, people make travel plans to leave themselves behind - Skylight is a record of what we miss in the world inside and outside our windows.

Acclaimed for his superior craftsmanship ("half the meaning of a lyric poem is in the music") and his summoning of sentiment without sentimentality, John Donlan in his sixth collection confronts our inevitable sense of loss and mourning as we live through the sixth extinction of the natural world. Yet always his work reveals the comfort and courage provided by close and loving observation of the processes of life. "The book that tells us how to be / lies always open," he assures us. How much nature is a part of us, and we a part of nature, is an enduring theme in his work. Yet he wryly accepts our separateness: "Finger-combing deerfly carcasses / out of what's left of my hair / I puzzle over my most minute machinery," and he concedes that "The path from there to here . . . overwhelms / as when a widower, hearing his wife's name, / weeps." And always his imagination inhabits and reimagines wilderness: a frog carried off by a hawk cries, "I'm flying, I've turned into a bird."

High in the Canadian Arctic, British art historian Jenny pursues her passions: Inuit art and a handsome geologist. But the sudden news that her mother has suffered a stroke reels Jenny back to her old life - the responsible youngest daughter of parents who gave up everything to join a religious cult. In Inverness, Jenny tries to put the jumbled pieces together, while turning to her collection of "worry stones" for comfort. Did her mother escape from the cult? Is her father, a prominent cult leader, threatening to take her back? Can Jenny persuade her sisters to set aside old grievances to save their mother? Amidst the turmoil, Jenny tries to breaks free of the childhood pressures that stifled her creative talents and emerge as an artist in her own right.

In this young reader novel, ten-year-old Jeanie Leclare has just moved to the West Coast from Saskatchewan. She's desperately lonely and longs for a new friend. When the girl sitting in front of her at school seems friendly, she feels a little better. Then an excavator arrives and demolishes the cute house next door. Everyone, including Jeanie's new friend, Isabelle, is aghast. But Jeanie has a secret, a secret that she knows will turn her new classmates against her. At recess time, the excavator heads for a huge and beautiful cedar next to the school. Isabelle leads a band of kids, including Jeanie, to stop it. That's when they discover Jeanie's secret: the contracting company that destroyed the house belongs to Jeanie's uncle and father. Jeanie promises her new classmates that she'll do whatever it takes to protect the cherished tree. Trouble is, she can't convince her uncle and father to agree not to cut it down. So now it's totally up to Jeanie, Isabelle and their classmates to come to the cedar tree's defence. They are the Tree Musketeers.

Chrissie Crosby is young, split-second smart and completely pissed off at just about everything. Ginger Flynn is pushing eighty and still seeking answers the way wise people do. These two have much to show each other. Years earlier, a charismatic young professor, Nigel Childes, captivated Ginger while she was one of his students. Their furtive romance and eventual wedding appalled Ginger's disapproving parents, resulting in the family home, Stone House, falling into the hands of a questionable religious sect. After a dozen years of marriage, inexplicably, Nigel left his pregnant wife and child and was lost to them for what seemed like forever. The daughter, Irene, suffered deep wounds inflicted by her father's abandonment. Her brother Peter was burdened by guilt and sorrow from a tragic accident for which he still blames himself. He and Chrissie will enact an unconventional confession and communion, as will Ginger and her daughter. As climax to a tumultuous year, Professor Childes reappears, knocking everything off kilter. Observing from the sidelines, Shep, border collie extraordinaire, maintains the bemused detachment appropriate for most human affairs. With short chapters and point of view shifting among the characters, this is a story of compassion and forgiveness and the intimate connectedness of birth and death.

In this thrilling sequel to The Nor'Wester, Duncan Scott returns to England from Canada to search for his long-lost sister, Libby. Arriving on the Liverpool docks, Duncan learns that his sister's fate has captivated the entire country. He also learns a name: Elizabeth Fry, a prison reformer who helped Libby and who holds the key to her location. But before he can meet Fry and find his sister once and for all, Duncan is kidnapped by a Press Gang in a dockside inn. Forced to take the "King's Shilling," Duncan must serve in the Royal Navy where he once again becomes an unwilling player in the game of Empire. Now on board His Majesty's Ship Cerberus, Duncan meets old friends and makes dangerous enemies. Before Duncan's service ends, he will face deadly cannon fire on the Baltic, and will go on to fight an epic battle with Napoleon's fleet in the Mediterranean Sea, a battle that could very well seal his own destiny, that of his sister Libby, and of the British Empire itself.

Passageways is a major collection of Philip Resnick's poetry, spanning over 40 years. A number of the poems in the first section of the book, "Of the Greeks and Hebrews," were in earlier collections, which have long been out of print. The other four sections of the book tackle a wide variety of topics. "Faraway Shores" evokes various places the author has visited or lived in over the course of a long career. "In Troubled Times" contains poems dealing with political themes, some clearly contemporary in character, others more historical in scope. "Meditations and Reflections" contains a wide range of poems with literary, philosophical, as well as autobiographical underpinnings. The final section of the book, "Thanatos's Shadow," deals with the challenges of facing the death of a loved one and the bereavement which follows. Greece, and the region of Mount Pelion in particular, has been a major source of inspiration for Resnick's poetry over the years and this is strongly reflected in many of the poems in this collection.

This humorous and idiosyncratic collection of letters forms the unusual story of Gilmour Walker, a middle-aged man who, desperately afraid of dying, sets out from his home, somewhere on the Nova Scotia shore, to find a way around death. His inspiration for the mission is his reading of the ancient Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, in which the hero also embarks on a quest for the secret of everlasting life. Following what he believes are the modern equivalents of Gilgamesh's destinations, Gilmour visits such surprising places as Caesars Palace in Las Vegas and Death Valley. Yet this is no ordinary pilgrimage. Gilmour's eccentric flow of thought can switch from Gilgamesh to Henry Miller playing ping pong naked or a rejection of Auden's thesis in The Enchafèd Flood. Moreover, the letters are accompanied by the caustic comments of an editor who finds Gilmour and the entire journey appalling, comments that caused Gilmour to abandon the project for many years. Now the letters appear for the first time, along with the comments of the rogue editor - the two creating an outrageously funny mashup.

This trailblazing history of early British Columbia focuses on a single year, 1858, the year of the Fraser River gold rush - the third great massmigration of gold seekers after the Californian and Australian rushes in search of a new El Dorado. Marshall's history becomes an adventure, prospecting the rich pay streaks of British Columbia's "founding" event and the gold fever that gripped populations all along the Pacific Slope. Marshall unsettles many of our most taken-for-granted assumptions: he shows how foreign miner-militias crossed the 49th parallel, taking the law into their own hands, and conducting extermination campaigns against Indigenous peoples while forcibly claiming the land. Drawing on new evidence, Marshall explores the three principal cultures of the goldfields - those of the fur trade (both Native and the Hudson's Bay Company), Californian, and British world views. The year 1858 was a year of chaos unlike any other in British Columbia and American Pacific Northwest history. It produced not only violence but the formal inauguration of colonialism, Native reserves and, ultimately, the expansion of Canada to the Pacific Slope. Among the haunting legacies of this rush are the cryptic place names that remain - such as American Creek, Texas Bar, Boston Bar, and New York Bar - while the unresolved question of Indigenous sovereignty continues to claim the land.

Connie Fife is one of Canada's warrior poets. Poems for a New World, her third book of poems, refuses to take prisoners. She writes of Oka and Gustafson Lake, of the police shooting of a Native mother and child, as well as the NATO genocide in Yugoslavia. Reflecting on her own life, she carves out a space for new forms of loving that will act as a transforming force for people of all colours so that they may breathe the air of freedom, the air of a world rich in biodiversity. Revolutionary as they may be, these poems also care about language, about how language can become the food and joy of life. As she says, "I have prepared a bowl of ripened poems / with which to ease our hunger," placed an "empty gourd" beside the bed of love which waits "to be filled by our stories carried / across the heartlands of distance we will have travelled." These are poems of revolution, of love, of inspiration.

When Emily Patterson arrives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband and children in 1862, she finds herself worlds away from Bath, Maine, the staunchly pious township of her birth. Up the remote reaches of Vancouver Island's Alberni Canal, Emily learns much about self-reliance in a fledgling milltown where pioneer loggers and the native Tseshaht community share an often tempestuous co-existence. In search of their ideal homestead, the Pattersons next travel to Oregon's fertile Willamette and Columbia River regions, confronting both joy and tragedy along the way. After many years, their quest finally leads them to Burrard Inlet, where the sawmilling communities of Hastings Mill and Moodyville duel for lumber supremacy. Emily gains wide recognition amidst the hardliving mill workers for her extraordinary nursing skills, self-taught from sheer necessity over the course of her nomadic life. In a time when the nearest doctor is several hours of travel away, Emily is called upon day or night to deal with any medical situation, be it removing a splinter, treating a cough or preparing a body for burial.

The Kingdom of No Worries is the story of three young friends who create their own kingdom on a piece of land that emerges in the middle of the river that runs through their city. Inspired by their actions to create a democracy that is a model of social tolerance and global thinking, the surrounding community turns out in the thousands to participate in what becomes a radical cultural hub of the city. Over the course of one hot summer the boys grapple to learn what a democracy is and to oversee its demands. Alas, their nascent sovereignty is challenged first by a civic order of eviction, then by valid First Nations land claims, and ultimately by nature itself. Can the utopian dream be saved? The Kingdom of No Worries is an empowering tale that speaks to the archetypal dream that all children have to create their own world.

"All the world is a narrow bridge," states Rabbi Nachman of Bresnov. "The important thing is not to be afraid at all." These poems, Barbara Pelman's third collection, explore bridges both real and metaphoric: the bridge connecting Denmark to Sweden where her family lives; the bridges she has travelled across Europe; and the bridges we build through words and actions to overcome our separateness from one another. The poet writes about lovers, mothers, daughters, ex-husbands, grandchildren, and her attempts to construct solid foundations for the heart to travel easily across time and space. Pelman writes of her love of landscapes and the things in them, and the everyday epiphanies that happen in one's backyard. These are poems that explore the tension between living in one place but wanting to be in another, the losses and freedoms contained in solitude, the process of learning to age gracefully. The act of writing, Pelman says, is itself a talisman against fear, a mantra of boldness and courage to live con spirito.

This young reader novel about the Underground Railroad begins when Rebecca, a twelve-year-old slave in South Carolina, hears that Grower Brown plans to sell her father to another grower. Unwilling to accept the idea of slavery any longer, she shocks her parents by declaring that she will run away, with or without them. Despite their fear, they agree to go with her on the Underground Railroad to Canada. They are led by the famous Harriet Tubman, aka Moses, the tiny but fiercely courageous black woman whom Rebecca comes to love. On their journey north, Rebecca and her family rely on the bravery of freed blacks and learn to trust white abolitionists. A Canadian ornithologist, Alexander Ross, known as "the Birdman," stumbles upon the family in Tennessee and helps them make their way north on the Mississippi River. The family hides in coffins, travels on a steamboat, and crosses Illinois in a blizzard by pumping hand carts on a rail line - finally crossing the border to a free life in Canada. Railroad of Courage offers young readers a fast-paced story of adventure. With the introduction of historical figures, the novel explores the injustice of slavery and the moral imagination of runaways and those who helped them to freedom.

The stunning debut by the author of the Globe & Mail bestseller The Last Secret. "Ambitious, broad, sweeping, historical mystery." - Shelagh Rogers, The Last ChapterLouis Riel arrives at Batoche in 1884 to help the Métis fight for their lands and discovers that the rebellious outsider Josette Lavoie is a granddaughter of the famous chief Big Bear, whom he needs as an ally. But Josette learns of Riel's hidden agenda - to establish a separate state with his new church at its head - and refuses to help him. Only when the great Gabriel Dumont promises her that he will not let Riel fail does she agree to join the cause.In this raw wilderness on the brink of change, the lives of seven unforgettable characters converge, each one with secrets: Louis Riel and his tortured wife Marguerite; a duplicitous Catholic priest; Gabriel Dumont and his dying wife Madeleine; a Hudson's Bay Company spy; and the enigmatic Josette Lavoie. As the Dominion Army marches on Batoche, Josette and Gabriel must manage Riel's escalating religious fanaticism and a growing attraction to each other. Song of Batoche is a timeless story that traces the borderlines of faith and reason, obsession and madness, betrayal and love.

Louis Riel, prophet of the new world and founder of the Canadian province of Manitoba, has challenged Canadian politics, history and religion since the early years of Confederation. In Canada's most important and controversial state trial, Riel was found guilty of "high treason," sentenced to hang and executed on November 16, 1885. With 2017 being Canada's sesquicentennial of the initial Confederation of four British colonies, and with the question of reconciliation on the minds of many, the celebrations must recognize that the brutal execution of Louis Riel remains Canada's "great divide." Was the 1885 execution of Riel the hanging of a traitor? Or the legal murder of a patriot and statesman? Tried in a territorial court, Riel called out for justice, for an "inquiry into his career." To date, no such inquiry has been called. The spiritual and political father of the Métis nation and Western Canada remains branded a traitor to Canada.Weaving together Riel's words, writing, and historical research, long-time Riel activist David Doyle provides Louis Riel with the opportunity for the first time to give his evidence and assume his proper place in Canada's history.

This creative nonfiction biography of the celebrated Arctic explorer Dr. John Rae begins in 1854 when, on a mapping expedition to the Boothia Peninsula, Rae discovers the missing link in the Northwest Passage. On the same trip, a chance encounter with an Inuit hunter leads him to uncover the tragic fate that befell the officers and crew of the long-missing Franklin Expedition when, starving on the ice, they resorted to cannibalism. When the Scottish-born scientist and Hudson's Bay Company Chief Factor reports the shocking details about the men's demise to the British Admiralty, he is publicly belittled by such well-known Victorian society figures as the novelist Charles Dickens and Sir John Franklin's widow, Jane. From then on, Rae's life becomes a restless journey of soaring hope and bitter disappointment, as he attempts to restore his good reputation with the British public, defend the integrity of the Arctic natives who brought him detailed testimony about the evidence of cannibalism, and rebuild his shattered identity. Rae's search for what has been lost takes him to Hamilton, Lower Canada, across Rupert's Land to the Pacific Coast, to the Faroe Islands, across Greenland, and then finally home to the Orkney Islands where yet another turn of events catches him by surprise.

Stealth of the Ninja, book eight in the "Submarine Outlaw" series, brings Alfred, our courageous and idealistic protagonist, to a whole new level of experience when he pilots his homemade submarine to Japan. Here he visits a strange old man who lives on an abandoned freighter drifting on the sea. The man - a ninja, in fact - challenges Al to acquire greater physical strength and stealth. But it is also the time of the 2011 tsunami, and the giant wave capsizes and sinks the ship, taking his new teacher with it. Al barely escapes in his sub. Certain that the old man is still alive and trapped inside the sunken ship, Al faces the difficult decision of whether to attempt a most dangerous rescue. Should a seventeen-year-old put his life at great risk to save a one-hundred-year-old man? Or can one sometimes say that the risk is simply too great? Al must decide quickly. Time is running out.

This gripping novel for young readers begins in 1805, when fifteen-year-old Duncan Scott and his sister Libby lose their parents in a Glasgow cotton mill fire. Their tragedy is compounded when, through one reckless act of grief, the Scott children become fugitives as well as orphans, and must flee Scotland. Across the border in England, Duncan and Libby are betrayed by their travelling companion. In a desperate attempt to save Duncan from the gallows, Libby sacrifices her freedom for her brother's - a selfless act of courage on the Liverpool docks that sends her to prison and propels Duncan over the storm-swept waters of the Atlantic to Canada. After a year in Montreal, Duncan is enlisted to travel by canoe across the continent to New Caledonia, carrying secret orders for the trader, Simon Fraser. Before he can go home and find Libby, Duncan must join Fraser on a dangerous voyage of discovery to the sea, a journey down what Fraser assumes is the Columbia River but which turns out to be what later will be called the Fraser. Along the way, Duncan faces death, danger and treason, and must somehow find the courage to save his companions, the expedition, and himself.

The poems in Collecting Silence arc through youth, love and loss, to maturation, aging, peace. Wide travels throughout Asia, Europe and North America bring Narwani face to face with the oppressions of poverty, caste and religion, as well as the seductions of magical new beauty. The poems take the reader down the Chao Phraya River in Bangkok, to Chopin's garden; a village of untouchables in India, to remnants of the Berlin Wall; from the Pietà and the Mona Lisa to Magritte's The False Mirror. Always they are grounded in what Narwani can touch, see, love and remember. Growing up in Canada in a Baltic-German family that was forced to emigrate from their homeland of Latvia at the onset of WWII, Narwani strives to retain language, preserve links to the family's past, a vanished way of life, so it may deepen her own. Always she listens for what connects, what bridges boundaries and separations, for the inner home that sustains and renews her. It is in our silences, Narwani says, that memories, ourdeepest experiences, talk to us in a "language we all know without speaking." In this time of non-stop connectivity and chatter, Collecting Silence offers a timely alternative.

Briony, a prairie girl with a disfigured face, is adopted when she is nine by a childless older couple, Dagget and Moll, who appear mysteriously one day at her orphanage. They take her to their remote town of Crowsbeak in northern Saskatchewan where Briony, tormented by her schoolmates for her scarred face and dark skin, struggles to fit in. Briony soon learns that Dagget is in fact a renowned bush pilot and, partly as a means of escape, she begins flying with him. On one of their many flights in his iconic Norseman, he takes her into a remote northern reserve where she forms a strong relationship with an older First Nations woman, and learns she has a Cree background and family. Gaining confidence in her own abilities, Briony becomes passionately involved in flying and is soon acting as Dagget's co-pilot, going on to earn her pilot's licence. But then Briony is forced to question everything she believes when she learns the disturbing truth behind the scar on her face. This edgy coming-of-age story brings Canadian history and northern culture vividly to life as Briony fights to discover her identity and claim her place in the world. The final chapters describe a perilous flight through the Arctic, landing in fog-enshrouded Greenland, and then across the north Atlantic to the distant Hebrides.

"What is a stroke?" This is the question that plagues Ron Smith as he emerges from the carpet bombing of his brain. The Defiant Mind: Living Inside a Stroke is a first-person account of a massive ischemic stroke to the brain stem. Smith takes the reader inside the experience and shows how recuperation happens - the challenges of communication, the barriers to treatment, the frustrations of being misunderstood and written off, the role of memory in recovering identity, the power of continuing therapy, and the passionate will to live. Full of arresting anecdote, enlivened by a vivid and vigorous style, the book tells of successes and failures and draws on the newest research in stroke treatment. The Defiant Mind is a necessary book for stroke survivors still dealing with the effects of their trauma and for caregivers, vital to the process of recuperation, who feel hampered and harried by concern and confusion. For medical professionals, the book offers insights into the workings of the brain, the power of the brain to heal, critiques of conventional limits imposed on therapy and suggestions for ways to improve care.

When Willy Cameron, a lively fifteen-year old, is left paralyzed from the waist down after a car accident, she feels that her life is over. While at a physio session, Willy meets Ben, who is involved in therapeutic horseback riding to help with his juvenile arthritis. Ben persuades her to give it a try, and the riding gives Willy back the partial use of her legs. While still recovering, she develops a strong bond with Sand, a spirited rescue horse at the stable who was injured, and now spooks easily. When her friend Ben disappears after becoming depressed, Willy secretly takes Sand from the stable - against the orders of the stable owner - to find him. But Ben is not in his right mind, and Sand is easily spooked. The fate of Willy, Ben and Sand all depends on what happens next.

Thirteen-year-old Kalu and his young cousin, Aisha, are the only survivors when their African village is overrun by rebels and burnt to the ground. After making their way to the coast, Kalu gets a job aboard a smuggler's boat heading for Ireland. When the smuggler learns that the coast guard is searching for illegal migrants, he abandons the kids on Last Chance Island off the west coast of Ireland. At the same time, fifteen-year-old Spike learns that her father has died and she is shipped off to live with a distant relative, a woman who tends the lighthouse on Last Chance Island. Angry with her new situation, Spike plans to escape to begin a new life, but in one of her forays around the island, she discovers the two Africans who by this time are starving and desperate for help. What will Spike do? Is it a last chance for both Spike and the African kids?

To some extent, everyone plays with language and uses it as a form of recreation as well as a means of communication. Recognizing that the creation of true wit is a subjective endeavour, Richler suggests that the commission of language wit occurs not only wittingly, but also unwittingly and sometimes even half-wittedly. When we consciously manipulate language for the purpose of wit, Richler designates this process "arranged wit," and because sometimes the humour seemingly emanates from the mind of a nitwit rather than a wit, Richler designates this "deranged wit." Moreover, what appears to be deranged can actually be artfully arranged, or as Polonius might say, there is much method to the madness. Join Richler in Wordplay as he highlights the most whimsical English language writers throughout the ages and analyzes what constitutes both arranged and deranged wit. Prepare for chuckles aplenty, and even belly laughs.

Follow Garry Gottfriedson in this new collection of combative poems as he compels us and Heaven to listen to the challenges facing First Nation communities today. Employing many of the Secwepemc (Shuswap) images and stories, Gottfriedson takes us inside the rez and into the rooming houses in the city cores, but always drawing new strength from the land and the people who have moved upon it. He speaks of "the smell of grandmothers and grandfathers / breathing the stories into our blood" so as to "wrap our newborn in freshly made Star Quilts."

In his 2015 Garnett Sedgewick lecture, award-winning poet and literary critic Stephen Burt discusses the relation of poetry to time, space and place. He examines the widespread and popular view of contemporary critics who claim that modern lyric poetry is supposed to have a speaking self who resides outside of space and time, and addresses readers who do not care who or where they are. In other words, place or the "there" of the poems is supposed to have no importance to the lyric voice. But taking his examples from Chaucer onwards through Shakespeare, the landscape poets of the eighteenth century, and Wordsworth, along with a number of prominent Canadian poets such as Elise Partridge and Newfoundland's Mary Dalton, Burt shows that the lyric poem often relies importantly on an attachment to place and time. More significantly, he uncovers the fact that in lyric poetry "the contemplation of place is one way in which the `outside,' what's shared, potentially public . . . can seem to meet the `inside,' the private or individual experience that we may consider ultimately unknowable (unless it is our own) and yet expect poetry to reproduce." Reading Burt, one comes to see lyric poetry from a wholly new perspective.

Falling in love creates an enchanted time, and when it's on the magical Sunshine Coast of British Columbia during WWII, it is never to be forgotten. The increased emotions of a country at war are always present, as well as the heartache as the young men who joined up to serve their country return wounded-or not at all. For Meg, who is seventeen and beginning to go to dances and to meet interesting young men, the time appears filled with possibilities. She longs to enter the world of adults but with an education that will allow her a fulfilling life. At the same time, her mother and others tell her there is no need for girls to be educated. What she needs is a "safe" man. As Meg ventures further into the adult world of love and marriage she sees that it is filled with dark shadows. Can she take a chance on love while still pursuing her dreams?

Live Souls presents 210 of the numerous photos that Alec Wainman took in the midst of the Spanish Civil War, and his personal story of his time as a volunteer member of the British Medical Unit. Until the present only a small number of his photos have appeared in a few historical books, where they have been valued for their insight into the troubled period. After much research by Serge Alternês, the entire corpus of the photos was discovered - in excellent condition. In Live Souls, Alternês has selected the best of these photos and imparted valuable detail with his introduction, captions to the photos, a timeline, as well as an overview of the international implications of Spain's civil war from a contemporary perspective. Alec's photographs and story bring revolutionary history to life, offering a complement to what George Orwell described in Homage to Catalonia and what the volunteer medical teams achieved with Drs. Norman Bethune and Reginald Saxton. Alec's humanitarian ideal as an apolitical Quaker persuaded him to volunteer in August 1936 at the outbreak of the war to defend the ideals of liberty. His lens reflects his compassion for the citizens, volunteers and the civil war itself. The story and photographs keep the souls of the Spanish citizens and volunteers alive.

Jim McDowell's new biography of the little-known Spanish explorer José María Narváez, reveals his significant discoveries during the European exploration of what is now Canada's Pacific Northwest Coast. Narváez was the first European to investigate a Russian fur-trading outpost in the Gulf of Alaska in 1788. The following year he became the first Spaniard to reconnoitre Juan de Fuca Strait. In 1791, he charted the interiors of three large inlets on Vancouver Island's West Coast, discovered a vast inland sea to the east (today's Salish Sea), mapped the entire gulf, made first contact with Aboriginal peoples in the area, and found the site of what became western Canada's largest city - Vancouver, British Columbia. Narváez also undertook diplomatic missions around the Pacific Ocean, charted the waters of the Philippines, and engaged extensively in the political upheaval that transformed New Spain into Mexico between 1796 and his death in 1840.