In 1907, Charles Barnes, an American land surveyor in Ashcroft, B.C., envisioned a settlement for orchards to be grown along the Thompson River between Kamloops and Cache Creek. By 1910, a posh hotel was built and more than 2,000 tons of potatoes were shipped to market. By the summer of 1911, some 500 acres of fruit trees had been planted by the predominantly upper-class British immigrants to whom Barnes had marketed the development. By 1912, the new community of Walhachin had 180 permanent residents. They paid for a hugely expensive, 20-mile-long wooden flume to bring water for irrigation because most of the orchards were too high above the Thompson River for pumping technology. But when World War One broke out, most of the orchardists, who were staunchly loyal to England, chose to enlist, and by 1922 the promising paradise of Walhachin was empty. The heroine of Theresa Kishkan's novel, The Age of Water Lilies (Brindle & Glass $19.95) remains at Walhachin during World War One, pregnant and unmarried, having fallen for a charismatic labourer who leaves her for the imagined glories of combat in France. As Walhachin becomes less viable, Flora Oakden moves to Victoria and receives shelter from suffragist Ann Ogilvie in a house overlooking the Ross Bay Cemetery. Decades later, an unlikely but delightful friendship emerges between seventy-year-old Flora and her seven-year-old neighbour Tessa, against the backdrop of the pacifist movement of the 1960s. 978-1-897142-42-4

[BCBW 2009}