The Curve of Time

A beloved and bestselling Pacific Northwest adventure classic, now available in paperback!

Widowed at the age of thirty-five, Muriel Wylie Blanchet packed up her five children in the summers that followed and set out aboard the twenty-five-foot Caprice. For fifteen summers, in the 1920s and 1930s, the family explored the coves and islands of the West Coast, encountering settlers and hermits, hungry bears and dangerous tides, and falling under the spell of the region's natural beauty.

Driven by curiosity, the family followed the quiet coastline, and Blanchet--known as Capi, after her boat--recorded their wonder as they threaded their way between the snowfields, slept under the bright stars and wandered through Indigenous winter villages left empty in the summer months.

The Curve of Time weaves the story of these years into a memoir that has inspired generations to seek out their own adventures on the wild West Coast. First published in 1961, less than a year before the author died, Blanchet's captivating work has become a bestselling classic of travel writing.

Now available from Harbour Publishing, this new edition contains maps of the Pacific Northwest coast showing the journeys of the Caprice as well as an essay on the life and biography of Blanchet by celebrated writer Edith Iglauer.

M. Wylie Blanchet (1891-1961) was born in Montreal and spent her childhood as an avid seeker of the natural world. Her adventurous and independent spirit led to extraordinary summers with her children exploring the coastal wilderness of British Columbia, and her recollections of the landscape have earned her memoir a place in Canadian literature as an enthralling West Coast must-read. Her children's book, A Whale Named Henry, was published posthumously by Harbour Publishing in 1983. Blanchet passed away at her home near Sidney, BC, at the age of seventy.

Edith Iglauer was born in Cleveland, Ohio. She married Philip Hamburger and raised two sons in New York. A frequent contributor to the New Yorker, she has written a great deal about Canada. Her first book, The New People (1966, reprinted and updated as Inuit Journey in 1979 and 2000) chronicled the growth of native cooperatives in the eastern Arctic. She profiled Pierre Trudeau in 1969 and internationally known architect Arthur Erickson in 1979. Denison's Ice Road is about the building of a 325-mile winter road above the Arctic Circle. Divorced in 1966, she came to Vancouver in 1973. She married John Heywood Daly, a commercial salmon troller and moved to Garden Bay on the BC coast. Daly died in 1978. After writing Seven Stones: A Portrait of Arthur Erickson, Architect (1981) she began recording her memories of her late husband and his salmon troller the MoreKelp. The result was Fishing with John, a runaway bestseller and nominee for the 1989 Governor General's Award for Non-Fiction. Her second memoir, about her career in journalism, was The Strangers Next Door.