Right around the corner from the exit of the Galiano ferry terminal sits the first independent bookstore of the island, Galiano Island Books. Since its opening in 1997, the storefront has remained the heart of the island’s arts and culture community. Owners and avid-readers, Lee Trentadue and Jim Schmidt share their top 10 reads of the year.
From the award-winning author of If I Fall, If I Die comes a propulsive, multigenerational family story, in which the unexpected legacies of a remote island off the coast of British Columbia will link the fates of five people over a hundred years. Cloud Atlas meets The Overstory in this ingenious nested-ring epic set against the devastation of the natural world.
An Earthling’s Guide to Outer Space by Bob McDonald
Beloved science commentator Bob McDonald takes us on a tour of our galaxy, unraveling the mysteries of the universe and helping us navigate our place among the stars.
Taking Measures by George Bowering
Taking Measures includes work from each of the last six decades, beginning with Bowering’s engagement with process-based long poems in the 1960s and 1970s and moving through his continued exploration of the form in recent decades.
Gather: A Dirty Apron Cookbook by David Robertson
Bestselling chef David Robertson, of The Dirty Apron Cooking School, is back with a stunningly designed book of new recipes for the home cook and the whole family. The Dirty Apron Cooking School has taught thousands of Canadians to cook. In this anticipated follow-up to his bestselling Dirty Apron Cookbook, David Robertson’s latest book celebrates the simple pleasures of cooking food for friends and family.
Cedar and Salt: Vancouver Island Recipes by Emily Lycopolus
Homegrown, modern recipes that feature the most treasured local ingredients from Vancouver Island’s forests, fields, farms and sea. Off the shore of Canada’s west coast lies a food lover’s island paradise. Vancouver Island’s temperate climate nurtures a bounty of wild foods, heritage grains, organic produce, sustainable meats and artisan-crafted edible delights. This thoughtfully curated, beautifully photographed cookbook brings Vancouver Island’s abundant food scene into the kitchens of home cooks everywhere.
Under Occupation by Alan Furst
From “America’s preeminent spy novelist” (The New York Times), Alan Furst, comes a fast-paced, mesmerizing thriller of the French resistance fighters working secretly and bravely to defeat Hitler.
Morning Glory on the Vine by Joni Mitchell
A gorgeous compendium of Joni Mitchell’s handwritten lyrics and drawings, originally handcrafted as a gift for a select group of friends in 1971 and now available to the public for the first time. In 1971, as her album Blue topped charts around the world, Joni Mitchell crafted one hundred copies of Morning Glory on the Vine as a holiday gift for her closest friends. For this stunningly beautiful book, Joni hand-wrote an exquisite selection of her own lyrics and poems and illustrated them with more than thirty of her original pictures. Handcrafted, signed, and numbered in Los Angeles, the existing copies of this labor of love have rarely been seen in the past half-century.
Fishes of the Salish Sea by Theodore Pietsch and James Wilder Orr
Fishes of the Salish Sea is the definitive guide to the fishes of Puget Sound and the Straits of Georgia and Juan de Fuca. Featuring striking illustrations of the Salish Sea’s 260 fish species by noted illustrator Joseph Tomelleri, this comprehensive three-volume set details the ecology and life history of each species, and recounts the region’s rich heritage of marine research and exploration.
From the #1 nationally bestselling author of By Gaslight, a novel of exquisite emotional force about love and art in the life of one of the great writers, reminiscent of Colm Tóibín’s The Master, or Michael Cunningham’s The Hours. In sun-drenched Sicily, among the decadent Italian aristocracy of the late 1950s, Giuseppe Tomasi, the last prince of Lampedusa, struggles to complete the novel that will be his lasting legacy, The Leopard. With a firm devotion to the historical record, Lampedusa leaps effortlessly into the mind of the writer and inhabits the complicated heart of a man facing down the end of his life, struggling to make something of lasting worth, while there is still time.
The Innocents by Michael Crummey
From bestselling, award-winning author Michael Crummey comes a sweeping, heart-wrenching, deeply immersive novel about a brother and sister alone in a small world. A brother and sister are orphaned in an isolated cove on Newfoundland’s northern coastline. Their home is a stretch of rocky shore governed by the feral ocean, by a relentless pendulum of abundance and murderous scarcity. Still children with only the barest notion of the outside world, they have nothing but the family’s boat and the little knowledge passed on haphazardly by their mother and father to keep them.
