A page-turning memoir about a young woman's grueling, revelatory summers working alone in a remote lookout tower and her eyewitness account of the increasingly unpredictable nature of wildfire in the Canadian north. While growing up in Peace River, Alberta, Trina Moyles heard many stories of Lookout Observers--strange, eccentric types who spent five-month summers alone, climbing 100-foot high towers and watching for signs of fire in the surrounding boreal forest. How could you isolate yourself for that long? she wondered. "I could never do it," she told herself. Craving a deeper sense of purpose, she left northern Alberta to pursue a decade-long career in global humanitarian work. After three years in East Africa, and newly engaged, Trina returned to Peace River with a plan to sponsor her fiance, Akello's, immigration to Canada. Despite her fear of being alone in the woods, she applied for a seasonal lookout position and got the job. Thus begins Trina's first summer as one of a handful of lookouts scattered throughout Alberta, with only a farm dog, Holly--labeled "a domesticated wolf" by her former owners--to keep her company. While searching for smoke, Trina unravels under the pressure of a long-distance relationship--and a dawning awareness of the environmental crisis that climate change is producing in the boreal. Through megafires, lightning storms, and stunning encounters with wildlife, she learns to survive at the fire tower by forging deep connections with nature and with an extraordinary community of people dedicated to wildfire detection and combat. In isolation, she discovers a kind of self-awareness--and freedom--that only solitude can deliver. Lookout is a riveting story of loss, transformation, and belonging to oneself, layered with an eyewitness account of the destructive and regenerative power of wildfire in our northern forests.

“A wonderful book that highlights the globally unique and important boreal forest ecoregion from an avian perspective, with fresh twists. Your ideas about where those migrant and wintering birds in your backyards have come from will be forever changed after you read this.”--Gordon Orians, Professor Emeritus of Biology, University of Washington “One of the planet's most amazing spectacles is the seasonal ebb and flow of migrants from the boreal forests to warmer winter quarters, with stopovers in our neighborhoods in between. This book tells you how connected the world is and what's at risk if we damage any part of it.”--Stuart Pimm, Doris Duke Professor of Conservation Ecology, Duke University, winner of the 2006 Dr. A. H. Heineken Prize “This diverse set of contributions about birds that nest in and migrate to and from North America's boreal forest demonstrates the remarkable interconnectedness of ecosystems across the hemispheres and the incredible responsibility we face to protect them.”--Bridget Stutchbury, York University, author of Silence of the Songbirds and The Private Lives of Birds “The fact that billions of birds breed in North America’s boreal forest is amazing enough, but this assemblage is even more remarkable when understood as playing completely different, major ecological roles across the temperate and tropical Americas during the northern winter. This book definitely will broaden your thinking about ecological connections across the hemisphere and the global-scale phenomenon that crosses our skies twice each year.”--John W. Fitzpatrick, Louis Agassiz Fuertes Director, Cornell Lab of Ornithology

“Moderow’s dedication and love for the Huskies that accompany her from Anchorage to Nome is the soul that drives this insightful and touching memoir.”—Cowgirl Magazine At age forty-seven, a mother of two, Debbie Moderow was not your average musher in the Iditarod, but that’s where she found herself when, less than 200 miles from the finish line, her dogs decided they didn’t want to run anymore. After all her preparation, after all the careful management of her team, and after their running so well for over a week, the huskies balked. But the sting of not completing the race after coming so far was nothing compared to the disappointment Moderow felt in having lost touch with her dogs. Fast into the Night is the gripping story of Moderow’s journeys along the Iditarod trail with her team of spunky huskies: Taiga and Su, Piney and Creek, Nacho and Zeppy, Juliet and the headstrong leader, Kanga. The first failed attempt crushed Moderow’s confidence, but after reconnecting with her dogs she returned and ventured again to Nome, pushing through injuries, hallucinations, epic storms, flipped sleds, and clashing personalities, both human and canine. And she prevailed. A tale of survival, loyalty, and the mysterious connection between humans and dogs, Fast into the Night is “what may be the quintessential Iditarod story . . . a great Alaskan adventure well told” (Dave Atcheson, author of Dead Reckoning). “When a memoir magically materializes before your eyes, striking all the right chords, it’s a wonder to behold—truly beautiful. In Fast into the Night that is precisely what Debbie Clarke Moderow graces us with.”—Anchorage Press

A unique look at the boreal forest, Earth’s vast and vital wilderness. The boreal forest, the planet’s largest land biome, spans the northern regions like “a scarf around the neck of the world.” Besides providing homes for many species, the forest’s influence is far-reaching: its trees and wetlands clean our air and water and are helping slow global climate change. In this evocative tour, a lyrical fictional narrative is paired with informational sidebars that describe life in the forest throughout the year, from one country to another. One of the world’s most magnificent regions comes to vivid life through the art of storytelling.

A beautiful, moving memoir of a boy’s coming of age, infused with a deep love of the land, from one of Canada’s most cherished and acclaimed writers. In Of This Earth, Rudy Wiebe gives vivid life again to the vanished world of Speedwell, Saskatchewan, an isolated, poplar-forested, mostly Mennonite community – and Rudy’s first home. Too young to do heavy work, Rudy witnessed a way of life that was soon to disappear. And we experience with him the hard labour of clearing the stony, silty bushland; the digging out of precious wells one bucket of dirt at a time; sorrow at the death of a beloved sister; the disorienting searches for grazing cattle in the vast wilderness sloughs and the sweet discovery of the power of reading. Rare personal photographs (reproduced throughout the book) and the fragile memories of those who are left give shape to the story of Mennonite immigrants building a life in Canada, the growth and decline of the small Speedwell community, the sway of religion, and a young boy’s growing love of the extreme beauty of the aspen forests – as well as how all these elements came to inform his destiny as a writer. A hymn to a lost place and a distant time, Of This Earth follows the best of memoirs in the tradition of Sharon Butala’s The Perfection of the Morning and W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz. It is an evocation of the Canadian west that only a writer of Rudy Wiebe’s powers could summon.

Disturbing and sensuous, Audrée Wilhelmy’s tale of a hermetic family minding a lighthouse in willed isolation is reminiscent of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. The Body of Beasts is a startling, gorgeously written novel that tells the story of the Borya family living in isolation. Their lives are altered when young Osip, peering from the lighthouse gallery sees a woman, Noé, arrive — her dress scant, her skin curiously scarred, and her manner mysterious and wild. Noé bears a child, Mie, to the eldest son on whose hunter-gathering the Borya family depends. She lives in a cabin on her own and covers the walls with drawings that allude to her mysterious life. The family’s entrenchment in nature is enthrallingly conveyed in young Mie’s sensuous ability to borrow at will the body of mammals, birds, fish, and insects. Her shape-shifting allows her to know the ways of the natural world, though only to a point. When her own awakening body starts to intrigue her, she asks her uncle Osip to “teach me human sex.” The Body of the Beasts is an imaginative tour de force, a beautifully described portrait of a world that exists outside of words; an uninhibited and erotic novel that, in the singular tradition of Québécois Boreal Gothic, explores our humanity — and animal nature.

Highlights photographs which show the activities of life aboard an Arctic exploration vessel, and captures the life of the Inuit of northern Greenland a century ago.