The Colony of Unrequited Dreams

Author	Jane Urquhart
ISBN	0771086504

A stunning, evocative novel set in Ireland and Canada, Away traces a family’s complex and layered past. The narrative unfolds with shimmering clarity, and takes us from the harsh northern Irish coast in the 1840s to the quarantine stations at Grosse Isle and the barely hospitable land of the Canadian...

Author	Ann-Marie MacDonald
ISBN	0743466527

They are the Pipers of Cape Breton Island — a family steeped in lies and unspoken truths that reach out from the past, forever mindful of the tragic secret that could shatter the family to its foundations. Chronicling five generations of this eccentric clan, Fall on Your Knees follows four remarkable...

Author

Lisa Moore

Winner of Canada Reads 2013 and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize


In 1982, the oil rig Ocean Ranger sank off the coast of Newfoundland during a Valentine's Day storm. All eighty-four men aboard died. February is the story of Helen O'Mara, one of those left behind when her husband, Cal,...

Author	Margaret Laurence
ISBN	0226469352

The Diviners is the culmination and completion of Margaret Laurence's Manawaka cycle.

This is the powerful story of an independent woman who refuses to abandon her search for love. For Morag Gunn, growing up in a small Canadian prairie town is a toughening process – putting distance between...

Author	Margaret Laurence
ISBN	0771099894

In her best-loved novel, The Stone Angel, Margaret Laurence introduces Hagar Shipley, one of the most memorable characters in Canadian fiction. Stubborn, querulous, self-reliant – and, at ninety, with her life nearly behind her – Hagar Shipley makes a bold last step towards freedom and independence.

As...

Author	David Adams Richards
ISBN	0743448189

When twelve-year-old Sidney Henderson pushes his friend Connie off the roof of a local church in a moment of anger, he makes a silent vow: Let Connie live and I will never harm another soul. At that very moment, Connie stands, laughs, and walks away. Sidney keeps his promise through adulthood despite...

Author	Wayson Choy
ISBN	1590512162

"Beautifully written. . . . It renders a complex and complete human world, which by the end we have learned to love."
— The Boston Book Review

Chinatown, Vancouver, in the late 1930s and '40s provides the backdrop for this poignant first novel, told through the vivid reminiscences of...

Author	Joseph Boyden
ISBN	0670020575

A haunting novel about identity, love, and loss by the author of Three Day Road

Will Bird is a legendary Cree bush pilot, now lying in a coma in a hospital in his hometown of Moose Factory, Ontario. His niece Annie Bird, beautiful and self-reliant, has returned from her own perilous journey to...

Author	Alistair MacLeod
ISBN	0393341194

Alistair MacLeod musters all of the skill and grace that have won him an international following to give us No Great Mischief, the story of a fiercely loyal family and the tradition that drives it.


Generations after their forebears went into exile, the MacDonalds still face seemingly...

Author	Miriam Toews
ISBN	1582433224

In this stunning coming-of-age novel, award-winner Miriam Toews balances grief and hope in the voice of a witty, beleaguered teenager whose family is shattered by fundamentalist Christianity.

"Half of our family, the better-looking half, is missing," Nomi Nickel tells us at the beginning...

Author	Richard B. Wright
ISBN	0060506075

In a small town in Canada, Clara Callan reluctantly takes leave of her sister, Nora, who is bound for New York. It's a time when the growing threat of fascism in Europe is a constant worry, and people escape from reality through radio and the movies. Meanwhile, the two sisters -- vastly different in personality,...

Author	Timothy Findley
ISBN	0060936436

Narrated by Charlie Kilworth, whose birth is an echo of his mother's own illegitimate beginnings, The Piano Man's Daughter is the lyrical, multilayered tale of Charlie's mother, Lily, his grandmother Ede, and their family. Lily is a woman pursued by her own demons, "making off with the matches just...

Author	Gail Anderson-Dargatz
ISBN	1860493874

"The cure for death by lightning was handwritten in thick, messy blue ink in my mother’s scrapbook, under the recipe for my father’s favourite oatcakes: Dunk the dead by lightning in a cold water bath for two hours and if still dead, add vinegar and soak for an hour more."

So begins Gail Anderson-Dargatz’s...

Author	Linden MacIntyre
ISBN	0307357066

The year is 1993 and Father Duncan MacAskill stands at a small Cape Breton fishing harbour a few miles from where he grew up. Enjoying the timeless sight of a father and son piloting a boat, Duncan takes a moment’s rest from his worries. But he does not yet know that his already strained faith is about to...

Author	Donna Morrissey
ISBN	0143014315

Kit's Law is the passionate, well-told story of three feisty female characters struggling against imposed order and male tradition in a harsh Newfoundland outport. Lizzy is the steadfast grandmother; crazy, red-haired Josie, the mother; and Kit, the 14-year-old daughter who tells their story....