The Curve of Time

A beloved Pacific Northwest classic, in an expanded new edition, including maps and previously unpublished photographs.

Widowed at just thirty-five, Muriel Wylie Blanchet packed her five young children aboard her twenty-five-foot motor launch Caprice. During the summers of the late 1920s and 1930s, the family explored the coves and islands of British Columbia, falling under the spell of the region’s natural beauty while encountering settlers and hermits, prowling bears and dangerous tide rips. Blanchet—known as Capi— recorded their wonder as they threaded their way between the snowfields, slept under the stars and wandered through Indigenous winter villages left empty in the summer months.

The Curve of Time gathers 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 classic of travel writing and one of the bestselling BC books of all time.

Generously illustrated with maps and family photographs, this new edition offers a preface by publisher Howard White; a new foreword by two of Blanchet’s grandchildren, Michael Blanchet and Judy Reid; a biographical essay by celebrated journalist Edith Iglauer, plus Blanchet’s personal correspondence. Also included, for the first time in book form, is Blanchet’s incredible account of navigating the challenging west coast of Vancouver Island on the Caprice.