Susan Mayse

Long after Arthur lay in a rain-washed grave, long after the legends faded from memory, a new generation defended an old border. White town in the breast of the wood, this forever is its wealth: blood on the face of the grass.In a dangerous era, an enigmatic poem portrayed a war fugitive wandering her ruined kingdom; an earthen wall transformed enemies into uneasy allies; and a man with a famous name wrote an ambiguous inscription on a memorial stone. All three survived twelve centuries as fragments of a nearly forgotten world. Awen imagines the origins of the ninth-century Welsh poetry cycle Canu Heledd and restores the breath of life to a brilliant poet in a dark time.

"Late at night and wakeful, I don't count sheep as some do. I have another approach. I fish a reach of my river, a Vancouver Island stream born in mountain country that drops by way of riffles and pools and freshet-carved bars to a Strait of Georgia forty miles away."So begins this gentle, humorous, engaging memoir: a heartfelt appreciation of British Columbia's wild places, a tribute to the art and science of fishing - and, most of all, a funny, poignant story of how love and respect between father and son grow through many decades.In the 1930s, Arthur's father, the Reverend Amos William Mayse, moved the family from Winnipeg to Nanaimo. There they first fished their beloved Oyster River. Arthur's story unfolds from there, like the sweet, meandering river itself: the afternoon Arthur went from worm and spinner to real fly-fishing (with a Royal Coachman); the day he borrowed a tuft of two-toned badger bristles from Amos's shaving brush in order to tie the perfect fly; the moment on a fishing trip when Arthur and Amos, mid-estuary in hip-waders, realized suddenly they were surrounded by sharks. "He was a simple man and a good one," Arthur writes, "the best I've known." Their love of fishing, conservation, the outdoors, and each other are the stuff of a deftly understated, very moving memoir.

Prepare for and survive the Big One with this guide full of convenient checklists and do-it-yourself tips for both your home and your workplace. Don't be caught unprepared.

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.Susan Mayse combines the skills of novelist (Merlin's Web) and historian in this gripping biography of one of BC's most controversial labour figures, a hero among Vancouver Island miners and a dangerous subversive in the eyes of the authorities.