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Essential Canadian novels

The most important Canadian novels.

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59 items

  • 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…
    BookVancouver : Douglas & McIntyre, c2012.
  • Winner of the 2011 Scotiabank Giller Prize, short-listed for the 2011 Governor General's Award for Fiction Paris, 1940. A brilliant jazz musician, Hiero, is arrested by the Nazis and never heard from again. He is twenty years old. He is a…
    Large PrintThorndike, Me. : Center Point Large Print, 2012, c2011. — LP FIC Edugy
  • Bristling with intelligence and shimmering with romance, this novel tests the boundary between history and myth. Patrick Lewis arrives in Toronto in the 1920s and earns his living searching for a vanished millionaire and tunneling beneath…
    BookToronto : McClelland and Stewart, c1987. — FICTION Ondaa
  • The Handmaid's Tale is a novel of such power that the reader will be unable to forget its images and its forecast. Set in the near future, it describes life in what was once the United States and is now called the Republic of Gilead, a…
    UnknownNew York : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, [1986]
  • When Gamache receives a message from Myrna Landers that a longtime friend has failed to arrive for Christmas in the village of Three Pines, he welcomes the chance to get away from the city. Mystified by Myrna's reluctance to reveal her…
    BookNew York : Minotaur Books, 2013. — MYSTERY FIC Penny
  • In this Booker-shortlisted novel, notorious bounty-hunters Eli and Charlie Sisters take exception to their reputation as thieves and killers. The brothers are told that when they kill Mr. Warm they must steal his "formula," which turns out…
    BookToronto : House of Anansi Press, 2011. — FICTION DeWit
  • After the tragic sinking of a cargo ship, a solitary lifeboat remains bobbing on the wild, blue Pacific. The only survivors from the wreck are a sixteen-year-old boy named Pi, a hyena, a zebra (with a broken leg), a female orangutan--and a…
    BookToronto : Vintage Canada, 2011. — FICTION Marte
  • Elegantly written and profoundly moving, Frances Itani's #1 bestselling, award-winning novel is a tale of virtuosity and power. Set during the Great War and the 1918 flu pandemic, Deafening tells the story of Grania, a young deaf woman who…
    BookNew York ; Toronto : Harper Perennial, 2009, c2004. — FICTION Itani
  • 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.…
    BookToronto : Penguin Group, 2008, c2005. — FICTION Boyde
  • 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…
    BookNew York : Penguin, 1995, c1993. — FICTION Urquh
  • Based on the author's own experiences, this award-winning novel was the first to tell the story of the evacuation, relocation, and dispersal of Canadian citizens of Japanese ancestry during the Second World War.
    Book[Toronto, Ontario : Penguin Random House Canada, 2017. — YOUNG ADULT FIC Kogaw
  • The tragic story of a young Vietnamese girl is relayed in vignettes of exquisite clarity, sharp observation and sly wit. The reader journeys from a palatial residence in Saigon to a crowded and muddy Malaysian refugee camp and onward to a…
    BookToronto : Random House Canada, 2012. — FICTION Thuy
  • Will Ferguson takes readers deep into the labyrinth of lies that is “419,” the world’s most insidious Internet scam. When Laura Curtis, a lonely editor in a cold northern city, discovers that her father has died because of one such…
    BookToronto : Penguin Group, 2012. — FICTION Fergu
  • Shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Governor General's Award for Fiction, and the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. In 1968, into the beautiful, spare environment of remote coastal Labrador, a mysterious child is born: a…
    BookToronto : House of Anansi Press, 2010. — FICTION Winte
  • 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. He is only seven years old. And although by all rights he should have…
    BookToronto : McClelland & Stewart, 2009, c1996. — FICTION Micha
  • An intricate family saga and love story spanning two centuries, Galore is a portrait of the improbable medieval world that was rural Newfoundland, a place almost too harrowing and extravagant to be real. Remote and isolated, exposed to…
    Book[Toronto] : Doubleday Canada, c2009. — FICTION Crumm
  • Elizabeth Hay has been compared to Annie Proulx, Alice Hoffman, and Isabel Allende, yet she is uniquely herself. With unforgettable characters, vividly evoked settings, in this new novel, Hay brings to bear her skewering intelligence into…
    BookToronto : McClelland & Stewart, c2007. — FICTION Hay
  • Penelope Wain believes that her lover, Neil Macrae, has been killed while serving overseas under her father. That he died apparently in disgrace does not alter her love for him, even though her father is insistent on his guilt. What…
    BookToronto : McClelland & Stewart, 2007, c1958. — FICTION MacLe
  • The Birth House is the story of Dora Rare, the first daughter to be born in five generations of Rares. As a child in an isolated village in Nova Scotia, she is drawn to Miss Babineau, an outspoken Acadian midwife with a gift for healing.…
    BookToronto : Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2006.
  • Rose and Ruby Darlen of Baldoon County, Ontario, are two of the most extraordinary and unforgettable characters to spring into our literature. As Kirkus Reviews puts it, “The novel's power lies in the wonderful narrative voices of Rose and…
    BookToronto : Vintage Canada, 2006, c2005. — FICTION Lanse