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25 Canadian Books to Read Beyond Atwood & Munro
25
items Canadian literature is much bigger than The Handmaid’s Tale, Alice Munro and Anne of Green Gables. These are 25 Canadian books I’d actually use to explore it: famous novels, Indigenous voices, immigrant stories, strange literary experiments, Montreal...
Sections
5
Start Here: The Canadian Books You May Already Know
Canada Gets Stranger
Indigenous Voices: Stories, Memory & Survival
Many Ways of Being Canadian
Canada Away From the Obvious Places
Start Here: The Canadian Books You May Already Know
The recognizable end of Canadian literature - but not necessarily the most obvious book from each writer. A few major prizes, one extremely famous redhead and several good places to start before things get stranger.
If Atwood begins and ends with The Handmaid’s Tale for you, I’d go here next. A novel inside a novel inside another story, with family secrets, forbidden love and pulp science fiction quietly making everything more complicated.
The Blind Assassin - by Margaret Atwood (Paperback)
Munro is the reminder that a short story doesn’t have to feel small. Ordinary towns, marriages, missed chances and tiny decisions that somehow rearrange entire lives. Read one, then accidentally think about it for three days.
Dear Life by Alice Munro
Yes, there’s the movie. The novel is stranger, denser and much more interested in memory, maps, identity and what war does to the people who survive it. One of those rare famous books that is worth going back to.
The English Patient - (Vintage International) by Michael Ondaatje (Paperback)
An apparently ordinary woman’s life turned into something much less ordinary once you start looking closely. Quiet, clever and surprisingly experimental - and a Pulitzer winner that deserves more attention than it currently gets.
The Stone Diaries - (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) 15th Edition by Carol Shields (Paperback)
I know, I know. Not exactly a hidden Canadian gem. But Anne, Prince Edward Island and her talent for turning minor incidents into major emotional events have earned their place here - preferably in an edition nice enough to keep.
Anne of Green Gables - (Everyman's Library Children's Classics) by L M Montgomery (Hardcover)
Canada Gets Stranger
This is where CanLit stops behaving like something assigned in school. Autofiction, dark academia, generational ennui, philosophical dogs and other perfectly reasonable Canadian literary decisions.
Part novel, part conversation, part existential crisis conducted among artists in Toronto. If you like books that seem to be figuring out what kind of book they are while you read them, Heti is a very good rabbit hole.
How Should a Person Be? - by Sheila Heti (Paperback)
Two sisters, a Mennonite family, unbearable sadness - and somehow a book that can still be very funny. Toews has an unnerving ability to put humor exactly where you think humor cannot possibly go.
All My Puny Sorrows - by Miriam Toews (Paperback)
An MFA program, an unsettling clique of pastel-perfect girls and the gradual realization that normal campus rules may no longer apply. Come for the dark academia. Stay because you genuinely need to know what on earth the Bunnies are doing.
Bunny: A Novel
The book that helped give a generation its name. Dead-end jobs, consumer culture, storytelling and the strange feeling that adulthood arrived without particularly convincing instructions. Weirdly fresh again.
Generation X - by Douglas Coupland (Paperback)
Apollo and Hermes give fifteen Toronto dogs human intelligence to settle a bet. Things do not go especially well for the dogs. A tiny philosophical novel about language, happiness and consciousness disguised as an excellent dog story.
Fifteen Dogs
Indigenous Voices: Stories, Memory & Survival
No useful map of Canadian literature works without Indigenous writing. These books move between residential schools and their aftermath, family, land, myth, colonialism, speculative futures and very different ways of telling a story.
Hockey initially looks like Saul’s way out of the residential school system and its violence. Wagamese turns that premise into something much bigger about memory, racism, identity and what healing actually asks of a person.
Indian Horse - by Richard Wagamese (Paperback)
Coyote, creation stories, a dam, several people trying to manage modern life and a novel happily refusing to separate myth from satire. Smart, mischievous and much funnier than “important Canadian novel” makes it sound.
Green Grass, Running Water - by Thomas King (Paperback)
A missing brother, the Haisla community of Kitamaat, family memory and a supernatural world that never feels conveniently separable from everyday life. Dark, atmospheric and very hard to reduce to one genre.
Monkey Beach
In a climate-ravaged future, Indigenous people are hunted because they still have the ability to dream. YA dystopia, yes - but also a very sharp way of making Canadian colonial history impossible to leave safely in the past.
The Marrow Thieves - by Cherie Dimaline (Paperback)
The residential school is not the ending of the story here. Good follows five survivors into adulthood and asks what happens when an institution releases people without releasing them from what it did to them.
Five Little Indians - by Michelle Good (Paperback)
Many Ways of Being Canadian
Canadian writing doesn’t have to be set entirely - or even mostly - in Canada. These books move through India, China, Vietnam, Barbados and immigrant lives while complicating the useful question of what “Canadian literature” actually means.
Four lives collide in India during the Emergency of the 1970s. It is enormous, compassionate and occasionally devastating enough that I wouldn’t recommend beginning it on a week when you need cheering up. Still: read it.
A Fine Balance - (Vintage International) by Rohinton Mistry (Paperback)
It starts on a Barbados sugar plantation, then refuses to stay put: flying machines, Arctic expeditions, science, slavery, freedom and one boy trying to decide who he gets to become. Historical fiction with genuine momentum.
Washington Black (Man Booker Prize Finalist) - by Esi Edugyan (Paperback)
Music, family archives, revolutionary China and lives broken apart and stitched together across generations. This is one for when you want the kind of novel that builds an entire historical world and expects you to live in it for a while.
Do Not Say We Have Nothing
Vietnam, a Malaysian refugee camp, Quebec - told in fragments small enough to look almost effortless. A beautiful example of how a book can be very short and still contain several countries and an entire life.
Ru
Laotian immigrants, nail salons, factories, family, language and the small humiliations people learn to carry quietly. Precise short stories with almost no unnecessary furniture - which makes them hit harder.
How to Pronounce Knife - by Souvankham Thammavongsa (Paperback)
Canada Away From the Obvious Places
Cape Breton, Newfoundland, Montreal and the Great Lakes - plus one gloriously unruly Leonard Cohen novel. These are the books that make Canada feel less like a nationality label and more like a collection of very different places.
Cape Breton, the MacDonald clan and generations of family mythology carried around as if ancestry were both inheritance and luggage. A slow, beautiful family saga with a very strong sense of where it comes from.
No Great Mischief by Alistair MacLeod
Two orphaned siblings alone in an isolated Newfoundland cove in the nineteenth century. Start with survival fiction; gradually realize the real subject is what happens when two people have almost no world outside each other.
The Innocents: A Novel
Yes, it’s the pandemic novel. But the reason it lasts is the traveling Shakespeare company, the comics, the museums of ordinary objects and its stubborn insistence that survival without art isn’t quite enough.
Station Eleven (Reprint) (Paperback) by Emily St. John Mandel
Montreal through the eyes of thirteen-year-old Baby: shabby, dangerous, funny and occasionally enchanted. O’Neill writes about very bad circumstances without flattening her characters into Very Serious Literary Problems.
Lullabies for Little Criminals: A Novel
Before Leonard Cohen became the Leonard Cohen people put on late-night playlists, he wrote this wildly experimental Montreal novel about sex, religion, history, obsession and a seventeenth-century Mohawk saint. Not remotely sensible. A perfect way to...
Beautiful Losers