National Network for Equitable Library Service

An Audible Best Bio – Best Memoir of 2024. A searing, intimate and blisteringly honest memoir about mothers and daughters, grief and healing, and finding your voice. Minelle Mahtani had taken a leap of faith. A new mother in a new life, she'd moved across the country for love, and soon found herself facing the exciting and terrifying prospect of hosting her own radio show. But as she began to find her place in the majority white newsroom, she was handed devastating news: her Iranian mother had been diagnosed with tongue cancer.

This is the first book about the life and work of Harley Parker (1915-1992), Canadian museum exhibition designer, typographer, and painter. As friend and collaborator of media luminary Marshall McLuhan, Parker's influence extended far beyond the realm of art. In this groundbreaking intellectual biography, Genosko shows that Parker's unique perspective on museums is based on his application of McLuhan's medium theory to exhibition design.

A road trip through the prairies prompts acclaimed writer Sharon Butala to unearth the stories of the natural world around her, and at the same time revisit her own personal histories. After an isolating and demoralizing year during the COVID-19 pandemic, a friend invites Sharon Butala to join her on a road trip - together they will drive the thirteen hundred kilometers from Calgary to Winnipeg, stopping as they please along the way.

Mike Gouchie is an indigenous Nashville recording artist. Over his musical career he's had the privilege of opening for country legend George Jones on a cross Canada tour and has shared stages with Alan Jackson, Lonestar, Billy Currington, the Neville Brothers, Jo Nichols, and many others. A ten-time award-winning Country Recording Artist with deep Indigenous roots, Mike's journey through the highs of the spotlight and the lows of life behind the curtain is as real as it gets.

One of British Columbia's most colourful figures was Albert "Ginger" Goodwin, a slight young English immigrant who arrived on Vancouver Island in 1910 to join hundreds of others slaving in the hellholes of the Cumberland mines. What he saw there made him one of the most effective labour leaders the province has ever seen, and led to an untimely and controversial end.

Wayne Cope has TV to blame for starting him on his long career as an officer of the Vancouver Police Department. He grew up watching gunslingers like James Arness and Richard Boone, inspiring him to join up even before he finished college and his real-life working career has turned out to be more exciting than he could have hoped.

The compelling biography of former British Columbia cabinet minister Bob Williams weaves his political and economical insights with the story of his unconventional life.

Although Emily Carr is now considered a Canadian legend, the most enduring image is that of her pushing a beat-up old pram into downtown Victoria, loaded with dogs, cats, birds-and a monkey. Woo, a Javanese macaque whom Carr adopted in 1923, has become inextricably linked with Carr in the popular imagination. But more than that, in her short lifetime Woo became equally connected to Carr's life and art. Born to a strictly religious family, Carr was never able to reconcile her wild and passionate nature with the stifling mores of the well-to-do Victorian society in which she was raised.

The fascinating origin story of Wilson Duff, the pioneering BC anthropologist and museologist remembered for his contributions to research on First Nations cultures of the Northwest Coast. Wilson Duff was born in 1925 in the city of Vancouver and his turbulent early years were shaped by the Great Depression and the Second World War. An intelligent child, he quickly progressed in school. After one year at the University of British Columbia, he signed up for the Air Force. An analytic thinker, Duff excelled as a navigator on a Liberator bomber based in India.

Part love story, part survival story, part meditation on family dysfunction, this offbeat memoir chronicles the unpredictable life of a young wife and mother on Gabriola Island. In 1989, twenty-three-year-old Margot Fedoruk left Winnipeg and her volatile Slavic-Jewish family for the wilds of BC to work as a tree planter and to contemplate her mother's untimely death from cancer.