Here's a story about a family that comes from Tijuana and settles into the 'hood, hoping for the American Dream.

. . . I'm not saying it's our story. I'm not saying it isn't. It might be yours. "How do you tell a story that cannot be told?" writes Luis Alberto Urrea in this potent memoir of a childhood divided. Born in Tijuana to a Mexican father and an Anglo mother from Staten Island, Urrea moved to San Diego when he was three. His childhood was a mix of opposites, a clash of cultures and languages. In prose that seethes with energy and crackles with dark humor, Urrea tells a story that is both troubling and wildly entertaining.

Urrea endured violence and fear in the black and Mexican barrio of his youth. But the true battlefield was inside his home, where his parents waged daily war over their son's ethnicity. "You are not a Mexican!" his mother once screamed at him. "Why can't you be called Louis instead of Luis?" He suffers disease and abuse and he learns brutal lessons about machismo. But there are gentler moments as well: a simple interlude with his father, sitting on the back of a bakery truck; witnessing the ultimate gesture of tenderness between the godparents who taught him the magical power of love.

"I am nobody's son. I am everybody's brother," writes Urrea. His story is unique, but it is not unlike thousands of other stories being played out across the United States, stories of other Americans who have waged war—both in the political arena and in their own homes—to claim their own personal and cultural identity. It is a story of what it means to belong to a nation that is sometimes painfully multicultural, where even the language both separates and unites us. Brutally honest and deeply moving, Nobody's Son is a testament to the borders that divide us all.

This previously unknown collection of letters lets us experience colonial British Columbia through the eyes of a young British naval officer who spent three years on Vancouver Island commanding a Royal Navy gunboat during the Cariboo gold rush.

An account of life on steamships, this book draws on the experiences of seafarers in peace and war and during the depression.

A dramatic biography of the now-forgotten Canadian entrepreneur, who spearheaded the most technologically advanced projects ever undertaken in the country, and built a business empire that stretched to Brazil, but was virtually bankrupt by the time of this death.

This collection includes 150 letters Emily Carr wrote to her friends Nan Cheney and Humphrey Toms, and 100 other letters relating mainly to Emily Carr written between 1930 to 1945, the most prolific period in Carr's career as both painter and writer.

The remarkable journal of the 1864 Vancouver Island Exploring Expedition, a four-and-a-half-month journey that describes the island's pristine wilderness, as well as Cowichan, Chemainus, and Comox and the coal-mining town of Nanaimo.

These fascinating memoirs of Father Nicolas Coccola, a Corsican-born Oblatean who arrived in British Columbia in 1880, reveal the complexity of the work carried out by ordinary missionary priests.

These letters observe the mind of eminent author Malcolm Lowry at play on questions of literary technique, on films, and on the beauties and rigors of life in his Dollarton shack on an inlet near Vancouver.

This autobiography traces Shrum's beginnings on a southern Ontario farm to his distinguished academic career as chancellor of Simon Fraser University, head of B.C. Hydro, Robson Square, and the Vancouver Museum.