The final instalment of Read Local BC’s nine-part gift guide series
Part 1: Books to Relax With
Part 2: Reading for Pleasure
Part 3: Get Creative
Part 4: Books to Inspire
Part 5: Entertainment, Unplugged
Part 6: Stories for Sharing
Part 7: Knowledge is Power
Part 8: Make a Discovery
Is there someone in your life who makes the holidays happen? The person who coordinates travel plans, bakes six dozen cookies before their first cup of coffee, and somehow produces enough mittens and hats for the entire family to go tobogganing? Now, be honest, were you thinking about wrapping up a new vacuum cleaner or set of saucepans for this person?
We beg you, back away from the cleaning product aisle. Give the gift of a few hours of peace and quiet with the titles on our Escape into Books list. Pairs well with pizza delivery.
Escape into Books
Be transported with our list of compelling, immersive, and bingeable fiction and nonfiction titles.
Henry & Self: An English Gentlewoman at the Edge of Empire by Kathryn Bridge (Royal BC Museum).
Drawing on the robust collection of drawings, paintings, journals and letters of Sarah Lindley Crease, this book presents an extraordinary portrait of an English gentlewoman whose long life and marriage encompassed privilege and hardship, scandal and accolade, in the old world and the new colonies of Vancouver Island and British Columbia.
San Josef by Harold Macy (Tidewater Press).
For Clayton Monroe, the last hope for refuge is a struggling settlement at the far northwest corner of Vancouver Island. San Josef is his sanctuary from the imagined demons and real enemies who have pursued him for three decades, from the Civil War battlefields of Virginia and across the plains of Kansas to the gold rush gateway of Seattle. For Anika Frederickson, San Josef is her new home and her dream, a now failing community built on the promises of provincial government officials. The future of her colony, carved from the coastal wilderness by the tenacity of her fellow Danish idealists, is as uncertain as the storms that batter their farms. A man like Monroe leaves a burning trail behind him, and the autumn winds of 1897 bring a new arrival to Cape Scott, sparking an inevitable challenge to Clayton’s safety and Anika’s family. At San Josef, the rainforest and the river will bear witness.
Shot Rock by Michael Tregebov (New Star Books).
When the smell of October’s raked leaves gives way to that of morning frost, a mature Winnipeg man’s fancy turns to thoughts of curling. But this fall Blackie Timmerman has been hogging stones off the ice. His wife of twenty years Deirdre has left him; his precocious son Tino has moved out of the house and into political radicality, mentored by a relentlessly principled Michael MacGiligary, scion of the Winnipeg establishment. The two share a devotion to curling and revolutionary socialism, as well as a friendship whose closeness and secretiveness alarm Blackie on every level. And now, his north-end Jewish curling rink, the Queen Victoria, Winnipeg’s friendliest club, and most dilapidated, is going to be sold and the club disbanded come spring — if the Executive, led by Max Foxman and his clique of nouveaux riches, gets their way.
The Weight of Snow by Christian Guay-Poliuin (Talonbooks).
A badly injured man. A nationwide power failure. A village buried in snow. A desperate struggle for survival. These are the ingredients of The Weight of Snow, Christian Guay-Poliquin’s riveting new novel. After surviving a major accident, the book’s protagonist is entrusted to Matthias, a taciturn old man who agrees to heal his wounds in exchange for supplies and a chance of escape. The two men become prisoners of the elements and of their own rough confrontation as the centimetres of snow accumulate relentlessly. Surrounded by a nature both hostile and sublime, their relationship oscillates between commiseration, mistrust, and mutual aid. Will they manage to hold out against external threats and intimate pitfalls?
Tinsmith 1865 and Widow 1881 by Sara Dahmen (Promontory Press).
The first two books in Sara Dahmen’s Flats Junction series. In Tinsmith 1865, Polish immigrant Marie Kotlarczyk’s tinsmith father and brothers head West, leaving her no choice but to go along. Family, after all, is family. The Dakota Territories are anything but welcoming to the Kotlarczyks, and as the months trip by, Marie must pick up the hammers she’s secretly desired but also feared. When she faces the skeptical people of Flats Town, the demands of the local Army commander, and her public failures, her inner voice grows destructively, forcing Marie to decide exactly who she is and what it means to be a woman smith. In Widow 1881, Proper Boston widow Jane Weber moves to the Dakota Territories under layers of lies to save her reputation. Stirring up controversy, Jane rooms with the last Blackfoot Sioux in town while navigating a mercurial friendship with the fiercely independent town grocer. In Flats Junction, though, everyone has an untold story. Battling her shortcomings, falsehoods, and swallowing her inherent curiosity, Jane must choose how she will truly reinvent herself, and where she belongs.