Books published by TouchWood Editions

Fresh, fast, and delicious, this is the quintessential recipe collection of West Coast flavours for seafood lovers everywhere.

Ghost stories from Canada’s most haunted city, including tales from iconic sites such as the Empress hotel, Hatley Castle, and Ross Bay Cemetery.Beautiful, charming Victoria is world renowned for its seaside attractions, flourishing gardens, and breathtaking ocean views. But looming behind its picture-perfect façade is a city shrouded in mystery, with restless, disembodied beings that whisper ghastly tales of mystery, violence, and horror.Known as British Columbia’s most haunted city, Victoria is teeming with a plethora of spirits. Through this brand-new collection of disturbing tales, you’ll come face to face with:The Grey Lady who chills hotel guests to the boneA decorated World War I soldier who protects tenants from something sinisterAn inconsolable child who haunts the pool area of a defunct hotelThe blood-soaked spectre who runs through the infamous Fan Tan Alley to escape captureThe ghost of Robert Johnson, who perpetually re-enacts his own suicideThe phantom of a cranky hermit who plagues a beautiful lake houseA spinster who gives tours of her childhood homeAnd many moreGet to know Victoria’s best-known hauntings along with some you may have not have heard before.

The seventh book in the Cait Morgan series finds the eccentric Welsh criminologist–sleuth accompanying her husband Bud to Amsterdam to try to unravel a puzzling situation. Bud is as surprised to discover he has a long-lost uncle as he is to discover Uncle Jonas has met an untimely death. Bud's mother assures him Jonas was a bad child—but, from beyond the grave—Uncle Jonas begs his nephew to visit the city he adopted as his home to delve into the life he built for himself there, founded on his passion for art. With an old iron key as their only clue, Cait and Bud travel to Amsterdam to solve the cryptic message left by Jonas, and honour the dying wishes of a long-lost relative.

After her husband died in 1926 from a suspected drowning, Capi Blanchet spent every summer cruising BCs west coast with her five children and their dog in the familys 25-foot boat. The Curve of Time is the book Capi wrote chronicling these adventures, and it remains a bestseller and a classic in the annals of nautical literature. But little is known about the rest of her life. Cathy Converse found herself asking: who was this skipper, this mother, this writer? In this biography, Converse offers insiders recollections of this enigmatic woman, along with family photos and updated information about the villages, inlets and islands described in The Curve of Time. Essential reading for anyone who has ever been captivated by the book, the West Coast or Capi herself.

Winner of the 2017 BC Book Prizes' Bill Duthie Booksellers Choice AwardIn this collection of short stories, Pat Carney follows the rhythms of day-to-day life in coastal BC. Featuring a revolving cast of characters —the newly retired couple, the church warden, the musician, the small-town girl with big city dreams —Carney¿s keen observations of the personalities and dramas of coastal life are instantly recognizable to readers who are familiar with life in a small community. With her narrative of dock fights, pet shows, family feuds, logging camps and the ever-present tension between islandersand property-owning ¿off-islanders,¿ Carney¿s witty and perceptive voice describes how the islanders weather the storms of coastal life.Carney writes evocatively of the magical landscape of the British Columbia coast, where she has lived and worked for five decades. At the same time, she addresses the less-idyllic moments that can also characterize coastal life: power outages, winter storms, isolation. On Island brings the West Coast landscape —human and natural —to life and gives islandersand mainland dwellers alike a taste of what it means to be ¿on island.¿

Beyond Beauty is the story of a remarkable journey that Bill Terry and his wife, Rosemary, undertook when they joined a party of Dutch and British alpine plant hunters intent on botanizing on the roof of the world. The expedition travelled in a convoy of eight jeeps over roads that were rarely paved and occasionally terrifying. They crossed fifteen passes, some as high as 5,000 metres (16,500 feet), where even in midsummer, the wind scoured exposed skin.They braved days at high altitude, panting in the thin air of the Tibetan plateau, and were rewarded with collages of rock, moss, lichen, flower, and foliage so sublime they might be imagined as "perfect gardens," though no gardener or landscape architect had a hand in their creation.As the journey unfolds, Terry sketches the history of the region and observes life for Tibetans under direct Chinese rule and the ever-alert People''s Liberation Army. He reflects on the potential threat of a massive hydroelectric development to the wellbeing of the millions of people living downstream in Southeast Asia. Terry also contrasts the hardships suffered and dangers faced by pioneer plant hunters a century ago with the relative comfort and safety of modern travel in these remote and exotic lands.Throughout the book, the author''s distinctive photography portrays local custom and culture and celebrates the wildflowers in all their profusion, especially the almost heartbreaking beauty of the Asiatic Poppies.

When the beautiful and flirtatious Eleanor Wentworth is sent away from London in 1870 for her scandalous behaviour, she arrives, angry and rebellious, in Victoria, a town that falls far below her expectations of society. Soon, however, she is befriended by Celia Turner, the freethinking young wife of a conservative minister, and unlikely though it seems, they become lifelong friends. When Eleanor meets the fascinating judge Matthew Baillie Begbie, the first chief justice of BC, life in the colony suddenly becomes much more attractive. Discover life in vibrant, late-nineteenth century Victoria and meet the characters who helped build the province''s rich history.

Built in 1889 and now home to the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, the Spencer Mansion is a magnificent building with a rich and layered history. With detailed research, historian and author Robert Ratcliffe Taylor describes the original appearance of the house, designed by William Ridgway Wilson for Alexander Green and his family, as well as its inhabitants over the decades. Also known as Gyppeswyk, after the village in England where Green wed Theophila Rainer, the house is more commonly referred to as the Spencer Mansion, after later owners David and Emma Spencer. The book also chronicles the brief period when the residence served as BC''s Government House and concludes with the story of how the house came to function as an art gallery.A unique book, The Spencer Mansion showcases a true gem of Victoria''s architecture and history.