Best Canadian Literature
Top 10 Best Canadian Literature
: The Handmaid's Tale, Fall on Your Knees, Oryx and Crake, Three Day Road, The Blind Assassin, A Complicated Kindness, The Stone Angel, The Stone Diaries, The Sisters Brothers, Lullabies for Little Criminals
Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead. She may leave the home of the Commander and his wife once a day to walk to food markets whose signs are now pictures instead of words because women are no longer allowed to read. She must lie on her back once a month and pray that the Commander makes her pregnant,...
| 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 | Margaret Atwood |
| ISBN | 0385721676 |
Oryx and Crake is at once an unforgettable love story and a compelling vision of the future. Snowman, known as Jimmy before mankind was overwhelmed by a plague, is struggling to survive in a world where he may be the last human, and mourning the loss of his best friend, Crake, and the beautiful and elusive...
| Author | Joseph Boyden |
| ISBN | 0143017861 |
It is 1919, and Niska, the last Oji-Cree woman to live off the land, has received word that one of the two boys she saw off to the Great War has returned. Xavier Bird, her sole living relation, is gravely wounded and addicted to morphine. As Niska slowly paddles her canoe on the three-day journey to bring...
Margaret Atwood takes the art of storytelling to new heights in a dazzling novel that unfolds layer by astonishing layer and concludes in a brilliant and wonderfully satisfying twist. Told in a style that magnificently captures the colloquialisms and clichés of the 1930s and 1940s, The Blind Assassin...
| 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 | 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...
The Stone Diaries is one ordinary woman's story of her journey through life. Born in 1905, Daisy Stone Goodwill drifts through the roles of child, wife, widow, and mother, and finally into her old age. Bewildered by her inability to understand her place in her own life, Daisy attempts to find a way to tell...
| Author | Patrick deWitt |
| ISBN | 0062041266 |
Hermann Kermit Warm is going to die. The enigmatic and powerful man known only as the Commodore has ordered it, and his henchmen, Eli and Charlie Sisters, will make sure of it. Though Eli doesn't share his brother's appetite for whiskey and killing, he's never known anything else. But their prey isn't...
Lullabies for Little Criminals
| Author | Heather O'Neill |
| ISBN | 0060875070 |
A gritty, heart-wrenching novel about bruised innocence on the city's feral streets—the remarkable debut of a stunning literary talent
Heather O'Neill dazzles with a first novel of extraordinary prescience and power, a subtly understated yet searingly effective story of a young life...
| Author | Ann-Marie MacDonald |
| ISBN | 0060586370 |
The optimism of the early sixties, infused with the excitement of the space race and the menace of the Cold War, is filtered through the rich imagination of high-spirited, eight-year-old Madeleine, who welcomes her family's posting to a quiet Air Force base near the Canadian border. Secure in the love...
| Author | Anne Michaels |
| ISBN | 0679776591 |
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
Winner of the Lannan Literary Fiction Award
Winner of the Guardian Fiction Award
In 1940 a boy bursts from the mud of a war-torn Polish city, where he has buried himself to hide from the soldiers who murdered his family. His name is Jakob Beer....
| Author | Margaret Atwood |
| ISBN | 0385491026 |
Cat's Eye is the story of Elaine Risley, a controversial painter who returns to Toronto, the city of her youth, for a retrospective of her art. Engulfed by vivid images of the past, she reminisces about a trio of girls who initiated her into the fierce politics of childhood and its secret world of friendship,...
| 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 | Alice Munro |
| ISBN | 0375707492 |
The only novel from Alice Munro -- award-winning author of The Love of a Good Woman -- is an insightful, honest book, "autobiographical in form but not in fact," that chronicles a young girl's growing up in rural Ontario in the 1940s.
Del Jordan lives out at the end of the Flats Road on her father's...
| Author | Margaret Atwood |
| ISBN | 0385491034 |
Margaret Atwood's The Robber Bride is inspired by "The Robber Bridegroom," a wonderfully grisly tale from the Brothers Grimm in which an evil groom lures three maidens into his lair and devours them, one by one. But in her version, Atwood brilliantly recasts the monster as Zenia, a villainess of demonic...
| Author | Mordecai Richler |
| ISBN | 0701162724 |
Before his brain began to shrink, Barney Panofsky clung to two cherished beliefs. Life was absurd, and nobody truly understood anybody else. Even his friends tend to agree that Barney is a 'wife-abuser, an intellectual fraud, a purveyor of pap, a drunk with a penchant for violence and probably a murderer'....
| 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 | Joseph Boyden |
| ISBN | 0670064181 |
In the remote winter landscape a brutal massacre and the kidnapping of a young Iroquois girl violently re-ignites a deep rift between two tribes. The girl’s captor, Bird, is one of the Huron Nation’s great warriors and statesmen. Years have passed since the murder of his family, and yet they are...
| Author | Margaret Atwood |
| ISBN | 0385491069 |
Marian is determined to be ordinary. She lays her head gently on the shoulder of her serious fiancé and quietly awaits marriage. But she didn't count on an inner rebellion that would rock her stable routine, and her digestion. Marriage a la mode, Marian discovers, is something she literally can't stomach......
| 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 | Rohinton Mistry |
| ISBN | 0771061315 |
It is Bombay in 1971, the year India went to war over what was to become Bangladesh. A hard-working bank clerk, Gustad Noble is a devoted family man who gradually sees his modest life unravelling. His young daughter falls ill; his promising son defies his father’s ambitions for him. He is the one reasonable...
| Author | L.M. Montgomery |
| ISBN | 0553213180 |
Anne's own true love, Gilbert Blythe, is finally a doctor, and in the sunshine of the old orchard, among their dearest friends, they are about to speak their vows. Soon the happy couple will be bound for a new life together and their own dream house, on the misty purple shores of Four Winds Harbor.
A...
| 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 | Richard Wagamese |
| ISBN | 1553654021 |
Saul Indian Horse has hit bottom. His last binge almost killed him, and now he’s a reluctant resident in a treatment centre for alcoholics, surrounded by people he’s sure will never understand him. But Saul wants peace, and he grudgingly comes to see that he’ll find it only through telling his...
| 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 | L.M. Montgomery |
| ISBN | 0553269216 |
Anne Shirley is grown up, has married her beloved Gilbert and now is the mother of six mischievous children.
These boys and girls discover a special place all their own, but they never dream of what will happen when the strangest family moves into an old nearby mansion. The Meredith clan...
Emily Starr never knew what it was to be lonely -- until her beloved father died. Now Emily's an orphan, and her mother's snobbish relatives are taking her to live with them at New Moon Farm. She's sure she won't be happy. Emily deals with stiff, stern Aunt Elizabeth and her malicious classmates by holding...
| 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 | Carol Shields |
| ISBN | 0007154615 |
Compulsively readable, the main character comes from a very long, proud lineage of other literary protagonists who get totally fucked over by their offspring. Although it doesn't come close to the pathos & articulation thereof of, say, Lionel Shriver's "We Need to Talk About Kevin", nor the titan-in-decay...
Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town
| Author | Stephen Leacock |
| ISBN | 1406814334 |
Now with regard to Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock's 1912 Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, I have always (and from square one so to speak) been of the distinct and unfortunate impression that for many of us who have had to meticulously and with enforced thoroughness peruse Sunshine Sketches of...
| Author | Michael Ondaatje |
| ISBN | 0224093614 |
A spellbinding story - by turns poignant and electrifying - about the magical, often forbidden, discoveries of childhood and a lifelong journey that begins unexpectedly with a spectacular sea voyage.
In the early 1950s, an eleven-year-old boy in Colombo boards a ship bound for England....
| Author | Guy Gavriel Kay |
| ISBN | 0006479502 |
In the three novels that make up the Fionavar Tapestry trilogy collected in this omnibus edition (The Summer Tree, The Wandering Fire, and The Darkest Road), five University of Toronto students find themselves transported to a magical land to do battle with the forces of evil. At a Celtic conference,...
| Author | Margaret Atwood |
| ISBN | 0385491050 |
Part detective novel, part psychological thriller, Surfacing is the story of a talented woman artist who goes in search of her missing father on a remote island in northern Quebec. Setting out with her lover and another young couple, she soon finds herself captivated by the isolated setting, where...
| Author | Guy Gavriel Kay |
| ISBN | 0451457765 |
A masterful epic of magic, politics, war, and the power of love and hate—from the renowned author of The Fionavar Tapestry and Children of Earth and Sky.
Tigana is the magical story of a beleaguered land struggling to be free. It is the tale of a people so cursed by the black sorcery of a cruel...
| Author | Carol Shields |
| ISBN | 0679309519 |
Larry Weller, born in 1950, is an ordinary guy made extraordinary by his creator's perception, irony and tenderness. Carol Shields gives us, as it were, a CAT scan of his life, in episodes between 1977 and 1997 that flash back and forward seamlessly. As Larry journeys toward the millennium, adapting...
| Author | L.M. Montgomery |
| ISBN | 0553280511 |
An unforgettable story of courage and romance. Will Valancy Stirling ever escape her strict family and find true love?
Valancy Stirling is 29, unmarried, and has never been in love. Living with her overbearing mother and meddlesome aunt, she finds her only consolation in the "forbidden"...
| Author | Kelley Armstrong |
| ISBN | 0452286034 |
Elena Michaels is the world’s only female werewolf. And she’s tired of it. Tired of a life spent hiding and protecting, a life where her most important job is hunting down rogue werewolves. Tired of a world that not only accepts the worst in her–her temper, her violence–but requires it. Worst...
| Author | Joy Kogawa |
| ISBN | 0385468865 |
The Government makes paper airplanes out of our lives and flies us out the windows. Some people return home. Some do not. War they all say, is war, and some people survive.
Out of all the countries in the world, Canada is the one I have most seriously considered for emigration purposes. The stereotypes...
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 | 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 | Barbara Gowdy |
| ISBN | 0312264127 |
A thrilling journey into the minds of African elephants as they struggle to survive.
If, as many recent nonfiction bestsellers have revealed, animals possess emotions and awareness, they must also have stories. In "The White Bone," a novel imagined entirely from the perspective of African elephants,...
| Author | L.M. Montgomery |
| ISBN | 0553264931 |
Emily knows she's going to be a great writer. She also knows that she and her childhood sweetheart, Teddy Kent, will conquer the world together. But when Teddy leaves home to pursue his goal to become an artist at the School of Design in Montreal, Emily's world collapses. With Teddy gone, Emily agrees...
| 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...
