Experience Alberta's heritage and the outdoors in Country Roads of Alberta, an intriguing photographic guidebook that takes you to places off the beaten track. Alberta's scenery is as diverse as its topography. Fringed along its western edge by high mountains, the land descends through foothills to stretch into undulating plains sculpted by ancient ice into ridges, hills and deep coulees. Under the changing light of the prairie sky, the rolling landscape reveals tipi rings and medicine wheels—remnants of the first people to call this land home—as well as marks of later civilization: homesteads, old barns, churches and the graveyards of the first immigrants. Antelope, wild goats, moose, beaver, prairie dogs and birds are among the bountiful wildlife that flourishes here. In i>Country Roads of Alberta, Liz Bryan guides readers along the back roads of this beautiful landscape. In addition to driving directions and maps, Bryan includes snippets of archaeology, history, geology and other interesting information. Her magnificent, full-colour photos celebrate Alberta's many landscapes—some still wild, and all most beautiful.

The Pope walks out of the Vatican and into the rest of the world. He quickly becomes more famous than he ever was, and sightings of the Pope are reported across the globe including The Last Ranchman bar in Manyberries, a village in the lower righthand corner of Alberta. As the Pope sits alone, looking like a broken-down cowboy in a neon JESUS SAVES T-shirt and dunking fries in beer, the barroom regulars debate if he’s really the pontiff. With 97.3 percent of Manyberries’ population of 75 in agreement that the man in the bar is the Pope, the expected boost in tourism fails to materialize. Instead there is a series of strange events—infidelity, murder, spontaneous human combustion—until the pontiff is found on top of the town’s grain elevator with arms outstretched as if he’s gathering in the world. At the “end of Civilization itself,” as the locals call Manyberries, almost anything can—and does—happen. “Block” Broderick Crawford III tells this surreal tale of a handful of quirky residents whose lives are turned upside down—or right side up?—by the Pope’s presence. Block shares his own story alongside the town’s and its motley crew of characters and historic figures—from the inventor of the “sex box,” Wilhelm Reich, to Ordinarius Professor, Kaspar Heisenberg, father of the father of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Although Block is heartbroken by his sometime girlfriend Genevieve La Guadeloupe—who is found lying on top of the Pope in a field during a summer snowstorm—and ponders the foibles of human existence, he continues to search for meaning in an increasingly irrational world. Absurdist yet hopeful, The Pope Moves to Manyberries is a spirited satire that will appeal to the guileless and jaded alike.