Harbour and Nightwood: Spring 2024
Harbour Publishing and Nightwood Editions are proud to present their Spring 2024 lists, with books ranging from fast-paced novels to cutting edge poetry to stirring memoirs.
For little ones, the latest addition to the First West Coast Book Series (Harbour Publishing) is now available.
This season is chock-full of memoirs from Harbour Publishing that take readers far away from the city, offer insights into fading ways of life and put forward optimism and humour.
Aaron Williams, a third-generation British Columbia logger, returns to the forests of Haida Gwaii to witness a way of life in the grip of change. The Last Logging Show unravels the lives and dreams of those who log the forests for a living—but while one way of life is in the twilight of existence, another is being reborn.
The Road to Appledore: Or How I Went Back to the Land Without Ever Having Lived There in the First Place follows acclaimed author Tom Wayman from Vancouver to the Slocan Valley. With his characteristic humour and philosophical insight, his shift from urban to rural is depicted in intimate detail.
The Curve of Time has inspired generations to seek out their own adventures on the West Coast. Now, Muriel Wylie Blanchet's memoir is available in a new paperback edition with new photos, maps and a foreword by Blanchet's family members, as well as an essay on the life of Blanchet by Edith Iglauer. First published in 1961, Blanchet’s captivating work has become a classic of travel writing.
Fried Eggs and Fish Scales exposes the bizarre but enticing lifestyle of a fisherman in his remote community. Sointula resident Jon Taylor dishes up hilarious yarns, capturing the “rough but reasonable” freedom of Malcolm Island.
Popular motivational speaker and entertainer David Roche’s latest book, Standing at the Back Door of Happiness, explores the beauty found in unusual places with elegant humour and compassion. Roche was born with vascular malformation of the face, which he sees as an “incredible gift” that has forced him to look inside for beauty and self-worth. Roche tells the personal story of his journey towards finding happiness through activism and community.
Fiction lovers of all stripes are always able to find great books from Harbour and Nightwood. This season, we are releasing two stellar novels:
In Sam Wiebe’s new book, Ocean Drive (Harbour Publishing) paroled killer Cameron Shaw and small-town cop Meghan Quick find themselves on a collision course when the murder-by-arson of grad student Alexa Reed sparks off gang violence along the forty-ninth parallel. Quick must find Alexa’s killer, while rescuing Shaw from the brutal gang violence that threatens the future of Crescent Beach.
In the summer of 2000, Ines, a grief-stricken skateboarder beginning to explore her sexuality, leaves behind her sheltered hometown on a Greyhound bus bound for Montreal. Ines learns that loving herself first requires trial and error—and that "love" is not always an innocent word. Late September (Nightwood Editions), written by Amy Mattes, is an intimate queer coming-of-age tale exploring the nuances of love, trauma and mental health.
If you’re looking to find some adventure in the less urban parts of the West Coast, your search might be over, check out these informative and descriptive books from Harbour Publishing:
Howard White’s The Sunshine Coast is a book to be treasured, not just by residents and visitors, but by anyone with an eye for fascinating places. In it, readers will find paintings by local artists, poems by local poets, tall tales by local characters, miracles by shíshálh medicine men, tips on predicting the weather, a fair share of risqué gossip about historical figures, a good mix of bold opinions and hard facts and over 150 beautiful colour photographs taken by Dean Van't Schip.
The New Beachcomber’s Guide to the Pacific Northwest is a new edition of the bestselling beachcomber’s companion, updated with additional species, new information and photographs of West Coast seashore life. J. Duane Sept’s guide belongs in the beach bag or backpack of any avid naturalist, amateur beachcomber or adventurous family.
Within the revised fifth edition in the Dreamspeaker Cruising Guide series, Anne and Laurence Yeadon-Jones provide detailed knowledge of each anchorage and marina, including the latest advice about fuel docks and available services, as well as marine parks to explore and much more. The Gulf Islands and Vancouver Island: Victoria & Sooke to Nanaimo, offers over one hundred hand-drawn charts and up-to-date information alongside stunning colour photographs.
There are four poetry books on offer this season. Readers will find poems about science and astronomy, identity and love, interconnectedness and acknowledgement.
Reflecting on subjects ranging from Comet NEOWISE to swallowtail butterflies to The Incredible Hulk, Donna Kane’s new book is a thought provoking follow-up to her last collection, Orrery. Diverse in tone and subject matter, mixing humour and wonder, the poems in Asterisms (Harbour Publishing) take readers on a soul-stirring journey through the expansiveness of space and the interconnectedness of all life on earth.
Nestling into the place between love and ruin, Teeth (Nightwood Editions) traces the collisions of love undone and being undone by love, where “the hope is to find an ocean nested in shoulders—to reside there when the tidal waves come. and then love names the ruin.” Dallas Hunt’s latest book is about grief, death and longing. It’s about the gristle that lodges itself deep into one’s gums, between incisors and canines.
In Excerpts from a Burned Letter (Nightwood Editions) award-winning writer Joelle Barron places the experiences of historical figures and fictional characters in modern contexts—and makes their queerness explicit. This collection highlights the circular nature of time, demonstrating how even in a post-marriage-equality world, queer experiences and queer histories still face erasure.
Written in a speculative mood, the poems in Fine (Nightwood Editions) look back on the contemporary moment with its terrors and mythopoetic digital scrim from an imagined future, so that the voice itself becomes an incantation, a summoning of a world of survivance and beauty. In the follow-up to Ghosthawk, Matt Rader conjures a vision of the present from a deep future, charting the porous borderlands of the self and the social through a year of cataclysm.