Add these 10 B.C. book titles to your summer reading list
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Written by a former Hollywood assistant and screenwriter, this romp of a novel is set in 1997 and follows a young assistant with big dreams, who moves from Vancouver to Los Angeles to work for an A-list director. Once there, Charity Trickett's dream of climbing the ladder to screenwriting and producing success is stymied at every turn by a backstabbing co-worker and a big, potentially billion-dollar mistake.
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If you're a B.C.er and you're looking to stay in the province for your summer vacation, chances are, you're thinking about the Okanagan Valley. If you do decide to head for the sun, pick up a copy of this informative, entertaining and very packable book from seasoned travel writer Arnott.
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The Kelowna author of the Governor General's Literary Award finalist All the Quiet Places is back with the novel Bones of a Giant. Set in 1968 on the Okanagan Indian Reserve, where Isaac was born, the novel dives into a teenager's struggle with grief and becoming a man in a world that does him no favours.
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This cosy mystery is set in the fictional northern Oregon Coast town of Twilight Cove as it readies to celebrate an 18th-century pirate and all-around bad guy Dead Eye Dawson. Just before the day of celebration, pirate enthusiast and celebration committee member Jasper Hogan is found in a pool of blood in his study by fellow committee member Georgie Johansen. Georgie, who works at an animal sanctuary, goes into sleuth mode and sets out to find the killer. This is a perfect beach bag addition that comes with all cosy mystery signposts: murder, intrigue, love and two dogs with supernatural powers. OK, maybe that last thing is unique.
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Who doesn't like a good adventure story, especially a true one? Hughes — whose previous book Capturing the Summit: Hamilton Mack Laing and the Mount Logan Expedition would also make a great addition to your summer reading list — is back. This time Hughes looks at pioneering climbers who tried, in the early 1930s, to conquer Mystery Mountain, a.k.a. Mount Waddington. The Final Spire is a chronicle of fascinating history and good old-fashioned chutzpah.
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If the west coast of Vancouver Island is on your summer travel list, this book would be a perfect companion. Martin, whose family has spent four generations in the area, has done decades of research and interviews for this comprehensive history of Ucluelet, complete with stories about settlement and dispossession, tragedies and triumphs, First Nations history and contemporary culture. And yes, shipwrecks and sea serpents too.
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Calgary Herald
3 days ago
- Calgary Herald
Indigenous author who dropped out of junior high school releases second novel
Brian Thomas Isaac's voice is quietly matter of fact when he talks about growing up poor in a home without electricity in British Columbia's Okanagan Indian Reserve. 'That was simply how it was,' he remembers. Article content Many years later, the minutiae of those childhood years would inform his late-flowering success as an acclaimed Canadian novelist whose latest work, Bones of a Giant has just been published. But at the moment he simply needs to emphasize how important it was when hydro finally did arrive. Article content Article content 'It would be a step into the future for us,' Isaac says on the phone from his home in Kelowna. 'You don't realize at the time how bad you've had it until there's a change for the better.'' Article content Article content Isaac's early memories, inextricably intertwined with his creative being, become more intense when he explains why he quit school in Grade 8. The racism he experienced as an Indigenous youth was more than he could bear. 'It was just horrible. I couldn't take it,' he says. Isaac needs to evoke the past in order to provide context for his emergence at the age of 71 — after decades of working as a bricklayer and in the Alberta oilpatch — as an award-winning Canadian writer. It took this junior-high dropout 17 years to complete his debut novel, All the Quiet Places, a coming-of-age story about life on a First Nations reserve back in the 1960s. Published four years ago, it won an Indigenous Voices Award, was shortlisted for the Giller Prize and was a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award for fiction. Article content Article content Now its successor, Bones of a Giant, has arrived on a wave of advance praise from the likes of veteran journalist Carol Off and award-winning novelist Thomas Wharton. Meanwhile, for Isaac, writing remains an ongoing learning process that's gradually getting easier. Article content 'This second novel, Bones of a Giant, took me two years. I'm now working on the third book of my trilogy — it will probably be finished within a month.' Article content Isaac writes about courage, resilience and survival in the face of racism, poverty and the antiquated tentacles of the 19th Century Indian act. But one also encounters warmth, humanity and humour in his pages — and, perhaps most significantly, a celebration of family. Article content 'When I first started writing these books, I just wanted readers to know that First Nations people are people first,' Isaac says. 'This book is not about hate — more than anything else it's about how a family survives together and what they learn. My first thought was to write in a way that would allow the reader to know more about First Nations people, by walking with them and seeing the highs and lows, and in this way give readers a sense of what it was like.'
National Post
3 days ago
- National Post
Indigenous author who dropped out of junior high school releases second novel
Article content Brian Thomas Isaac's voice is quietly matter of fact when he talks about growing up poor in a home without electricity in British Columbia's Okanagan Indian Reserve. 'That was simply how it was,' he remembers. Article content Many years later, the minutiae of those childhood years would inform his late-flowering success as an acclaimed Canadian novelist whose latest work, Bones of a Giant has just been published. But at the moment he simply needs to emphasize how important it was when hydro finally did arrive. Article content Article content 'It would be a step into the future for us,' Isaac says on the phone from his home in Kelowna. 'You don't realize at the time how bad you've had it until there's a change for the better.'' Article content Isaac's early memories, inextricably intertwined with his creative being, become more intense when he explains why he quit school in Grade 8. The racism he experienced as an Indigenous youth was more than he could bear. 'It was just horrible. I couldn't take it,' he says. Article content Isaac needs to evoke the past in order to provide context for his emergence at the age of 71 — after decades of working as a bricklayer and in the Alberta oilpatch — as an award-winning Canadian writer. It took this junior-high dropout 17 years to complete his debut novel, All the Quiet Places, a coming-of-age story about life on a First Nations reserve back in the 1960s. Published four years ago, it won an Indigenous Voices Award, was shortlisted for the Giller Prize and was a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award for fiction. Article content Article content Now its successor, Bones of a Giant, has arrived on a wave of advance praise from the likes of veteran journalist Carol Off and award-winning novelist Thomas Wharton. Meanwhile, for Isaac, writing remains an ongoing learning process that's gradually getting easier. Article content 'This second novel, Bones of a Giant, took me two years. I'm now working on the third book of my trilogy — it will probably be finished within a month.' Article content Isaac writes about courage, resilience and survival in the face of racism, poverty and the antiquated tentacles of the 19th Century Indian act. But one also encounters warmth, humanity and humour in his pages — and, perhaps most significantly, a celebration of family. Article content 'When I first started writing these books, I just wanted readers to know that First Nations people are people first,' Isaac says. 'This book is not about hate — more than anything else it's about how a family survives together and what they learn. My first thought was to write in a way that would allow the reader to know more about First Nations people, by walking with them and seeing the highs and lows, and in this way give readers a sense of what it was like.'
CBC
16-06-2025
- CBC
Vancouver author and former MGM assistant's debut novel is based on her own Hollywood blunder
In the early 2000s, Christine Stringer worked as an assistant on film sets in Vancouver. She brushed shoulders with stars and knew the inner workings of Hollywood North. While working on a film starring Dwayne (The Rock) Johnson, the director hired her to move to Los Angeles and be his assistant while they finished up the movie — Walking Tall. "It was just my dream come true," she said. But her dream became something of a nightmare when she was accused of stealing a copy of the film and investigated by the FBI for piracy after she lost a DVD. That story is the inspiration for her debut novel, Charity Trickett Is Not So Glamorous, a light-hearted, comedic take on what Stringer actually endured — which includes a scene where Charity takes a date to a movie premiere only to learn he wasn't quite what she thought. "Jack is definitely a real guy that I went on a first date with in L.A. and he used me to sneak into the premiere of Mean Girls," Stringer told CBC's North by Northwest host Margaret Gallagher. 'She's a better version of me' Stringer set the book in the '90s, a little earlier than when she found herself in Tinseltown. "I am such a lover of Hollywood and, in my mind, if I wanted to write this book and have it represent the Hollywood that I grew up with and I loved, I had to move the timeline backwards a little bit," she said. She said she has already planned two more books for Charity Trickett, which will move into the early 2000s. Charity Trickett, who gives off true main character energy, is "everything that I wish I was in my early 20s when I lived in L.A.," Stringer said. "She's feisty, she's smart," she said. "I think that hindsight and age has given Charity … she's a better version of me because of it. When I was in L.A. and I was under FBI investigation, all I could think about was how it impacted me. I didn't realize, then in my 20s, how it was going to impact my boss who was on the verge of getting married, or how it would impact the executives at the studio who had decades of experience in their industry and have kids that they have to send off to university." In the novel, things go awry for the protagonist when she loses a copy of the big film she's been working on. If this happened today, Stringer said, the fallout would have happened more quickly. "With HD, that film could be distributed globally within seconds." In Stringer's case, things did eventually settle down. She continued to work in film for a few years before leaving the industry in 2011. As for the missing DVD, she said investigators told her that she had been pickpocketed. "He was trying to extort MGM for, like, millions of dollars — this is the story I was told, mind you, and then they caught him. Nobody would tell me any details, but that's the story they gave me."
