Oh, Canada! Our favourite books by homegrown authors
There’s never been a better time to herald our homegrown talent. Here, Globe staff share their favourite books by Canadians authors.
The Globe 100: The best books of 2024
Medicine Walk, Richard Wagamese
A great book can etch an impression in your consciousness that lingers long after the plot becomes hazy and the characters indistinct. For me, this was one of those books. Perhaps it was Richard Wagamese’s lyrical prose, his magical descriptions of the Canadian backcountry or the quest for an Indigenous burial place for his father that is central to the plot, that made it so memorable. Or perhaps it was the characters, including Franklin Starlight, a teenage Indigenous boy raised by a white rancher, who is summoned by his dying father, Eldon, to escort him to the mountains where he can be buried according to Ojibway custom. Or perhaps the searing and redemptive story that unfolds during their journey, as Starlight learns about his father’s unexpected life and about his own beginnings. Starlight rediscovers his Indigenous roots during his father’s quest for expiation yet no character is truly predictable. Nor is the plot. It is both desolate and tragic, witty and optimistic. And it is funny and ironic too. Richard Wagamese’s best-known work is Indian Horse, but for me this is the Ojibwe author’s most haunting novel. – Reporter Marie Woolf
Books we’re reading and loving this week: Globe staffers and readers share their book picks
The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be, Farley Mowat
Author Farley Mowat, pictured here in 2004, captured the “quintessential Canadian experience” in his writing, says Globe reporter Andrew Willis.Tibor Kolley/The Globe and Mail
Even the grade five version of me recognized this was more than a book about Mutt, a quirky family pet. Farley Mowat wrote a love story to depression-era Saskatchewan, to nature and to family. He made something remarkable and amusing out of the quintessential Canadian experience of growing up in the Prairies. He sparked a pride in country and reference for the outdoors that have grown over the years. –Report on Business reporter and columnist Andrew Willis
Best Young Woman Job Book, Emma Healey
This is a memoir with so many levels; a dark office comedy, sometimes absurd and surreal, almost scary once or twice, but it always rings so true. It’s a coming-of-age story for the 21st century, which means it’s about a twenty-something trying to survive the gig economy, the creative economy, all while finding her legs as a writer. This book is the proof that she very much did. – Kasia Mychajlowycz, podcast producer, In Her Defence: 50th Street
Indian Horse, Richard Wagamese
Books by author Richard Wagamese, pictured here in 1994, received several mentions for his poignant, often funny, portrayals of Indigenous life.Edward Regan/The Globe and Mail
This heart-wrenching novel is imprinted in my mind even though I haven’t picked it up in over ten years. As required reading for my highschool class in small-town Ontario, it sparked a necessary conversation about the dark reality of residential schools in Canada. It pores over the life of Saul Indian Horse, whose love for hockey takes him on a riveting journey to confronting his past. Though the film adaptation is wonderful (and made me bawl my eyes out on a flight home) every Canadian should read the book. –Editor Aruna Dutt
Alligator Pie, Dennis Lee
No saccharine kiddie verses here. Children’s poetry book Alligator Pie, first published in 1974, is rollicking, creative, a little bit twisted and so very Canadian. These poems are what the grown-up world looks like through children’s eyes, and they’re still a joy to read as an adult:
In Kamloops, I’ll eat your boots.
In the Gatineaus, I’ll eat your toes.
In Napanee, I’ll eat your knee.
In Winnipeg, I’ll eat your leg…
-Features writer Shannon Proudfoot
The Torontonians, Phyllis Brett Young
This is an obscure, long-forgotten title that I happened upon in a giveaway pile several years ago, described by the publisher as a “classic feminist story of suburban ennui.” It reminded me of a John Cheever story, but told from a woman’s perspective and set against distinctly Toronto landmarks. It’s a time capsule of a story woven around the interior life of its protagonist; for some reason, I’ve never been able to place it in a giveaway pile of my own. –Advice and Service Editor, Life and Culture, Idella Sturino
Permanent Astonishment, Tomson Highway
Permanent Astonishment by Tomson Highway a “joyous read” according to Marie Woolf.Supplied
Perhaps it’s because I’m a ‘Moony-Ass’ (the memoir’s name for a white person), I was astonished and delighted by Tomson Highway’s account of his upbringing in a remote Indigenous community where his family led a quasi-nomadic life in Canada’s sub-Arctic.
The memoir begins with the author’s birth in a freezing snowbank in a tent, and his dog-sled-racing father’s quest just days later to save his wife, children and huskies from starvation, despite slicing through his foot with an axe while chopping wood for their fire.
The memoir is packed with adventures, such as the time the author’s mother and baby brother are swept away at top speed on a sled after the family huskies spotted a fox.
I would defy any reader not to smile at Highway’s ironic descriptions of both his Indigenous neighbours and the Moony-Ass, including Father Egg-Nog, a superannuated priest who warns his Cree and Dene congregation they will burn in hell for dancing and much more beside.
The humour of this memoir, its fascinating insights into life in the far North in the 1950s, depictions of tragic events including the frequent burial of young children and Indigenous culture before the encroachment of roads, television and telephones, makes it a marvelous literary achievement. And that’s just the plot. The writing is poetic, compelling and sprinkled with Cree and Latin aphorisms. A joyous read. –Reporter Marie Woolf
In “Ducks,” author Kate Beaton explores the loneliness of the male-dominated oils sands.HO/The Canadian Press
This autobiographical graphic novel, published in 2022, tells the story of the two years Beaton spent working in the male-dominated Alberta oil sands. In her unique style, Beaton explores the often lonely, sometimes harmful existence of being the only women in a crowded field. – Deputy visuals editor, data and digital storytelling Danielle Webb
Station Eleven is more famous, a masterclass of speculative world building; The Sea of Tranquility may have been more ambitious. But The Glass Hotel is my favourite novel from the best sentence-for-sentence author working today. In it, the B.C.-born Mandel deploys her luminous prose on a meticulous mystery that unspools itself in long sighs and then in a thrilling gallop. But if you get caught undertow in the world she’s painted in seafoam grey, you might miss that it’s also a deeply researched book on global shipping and Ponzi schemes. – Opinion editor Adrian Lee
The Tiger, John Vaillant
The book centers on tracking a vengeful Siberian tiger; an anomaly that rocks the delicate balance of frontier life in Russia’s Far East. The origin of myth is explored and a reliance on it challenged. And video evidence as source material from a sequence of attacks translates to scenes as eerie to read as they would be to watch – nevermind partake in. –Visual journalist Timothy Moore
Bunny by Mona Awad is “weird and twisted.”Supplied
Bunny, Mona Awad
Weird and twisted in the best way, this book makes you question everything you’re reading. A dark commentary on female friendships and loneliness, it also critiques the academic mindset and the competition it cultivates. Bunny is completely unhinged and reads like a fever dream – it’s funny and bizarre and gross. –Design editor Lauren Heintzman
Tigana, Guy Gavriel Kay
Written 25 years ago, Tigana is a fantasy novel about a country cursed to be forgotten by anyone not born there, and the band of unlikely friends fighting to restore their homeland to the memory of the world. The twisty plot poses deeper questions: Who protects the soul of a country? What happens to those left out of history? Is vengeance ever justified? Naturally, there are wizards, prophecies and sword fights. And Kay, as usual, sticks the landing. I cry every time. –Happiness reporter Erin Anderssen
Nights Below Station Street, David Adams Richards
David Adam Richards, pictured here in an undated handout photo, wrote “characters that feel lived in, alive – and very much at home in New Brunswick,” says Globe editor Chris Wilson-Smith.Bruce Peters/The Canadian Press
Nights Below Station Street might not be the strongest entry in David Adams Richards’ Miramachi Trilogy, but it remains my favourite. The series, set in rural New Brunswick, follows working-class characters struggling under the weight of alcoholism, illness, violence and depression. Sizing up a tattered copy in a second-hand Ontario bookstore, fresh from university in my hometown of Fredericton, I was wary of narratives that might amplify the worst stereotypes of my beautiful, oft-mischaracterized province. But through sparing prose and a plot that sometimes moves nowhere yet always with great intent, Richards manages to create characters that feel lived in, alive – and very much at home in N.B. Their struggles are yours, and so are their fleeting moments of joy. If the stakes don’t necessarily grow higher in Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace and For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down (come on: those titles alone!), they grow more intimate – a stubbornly sharp focus on quiet tragedies and small mercies that helped me to see how no single life is shaped in isolation. – Business Brief editor Chris Wilson-Smith
Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry
Some people think Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano isn’t a Canadian book because Lowry was English. But it is the most deeply Canadian book, because it was written (twice, the second time from memory because a fire consumed the first draft ) in Lowry’s squatter’s shack on the beach at Dollarton, in the shadow of industrial Vancouver, a locale that infuses the book’s endless longing of an alcoholic wanderer’s unrequited and tragic longing for his former wife. It’s a hopeless cause next to the immortal fact of human corruption, a theme only too relevant to our current political drama. –Feature writer Ian Brown
A ‘masterpiece,’ say Globe columnist Marsha Lederman.Supplied
By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, Elizabeth Smart
The word “masterpiece” is surely overused, but it also surely applies to By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept. This slim volume of poetic prose, first published in 1945, is a fictional account of Ottawa-born Elizabeth Smart’s real-life, tumultuous years-long affair with British poet George Barker, which began oddly and one-sidedly: Smart found a book of his poetry in a shop and fell madly in love, never having met Barker (or his wife). The behaviour depicted is often destructive and hideous, but the writing is exquisite – each sentence a meticulously composed work of art. It is also a throbbing wound: the intense desire, anguished heartache and coming undone hemorrhaging from the page. – Columnist Marsha Lederman
Anne of Green Gables, Lucy Maud Montgomery
For those who ask why Canadian fiction matters, consider Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables. In between vignettes about Anne (or “Carrots”, as the nuisance Gilbert calls her, a nod to her red hair) an orphan’s plight unfurls. Anne’s story may have been inspired by the Home Children program, which saw tens of thousands of British children sent to Canada through assisted juvenile emigration in the late 1800s to early 1900s. My grandmother told me about those kids; my Ottawa schools had no time to mention it. Absent Granny’s oral history, Anne was my only childhood window facing that chapter of Canadiana. – Programming editor Elizabeth Howell
Mona Awad’s work received more than one mention among Globe staff.Christopher Katsarov/The Globe and Mail
As someone who spends most of her summers immersed in Shakespeare at the Stratford Festival, I’m a huge fan of Mona Awad’s All’s Well. The novel falls somewhere between a love letter to the original play and an outright rejection of it, and the resulting story is brisk, haunting and a little bit spooky, with a dollop of magic between the lines as protagonist Miranda elbows her way through chronic pain and a life of regret. –Theatre critic, Aisling Murphy
Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, Douglas Coupland
I first read Generation X in grade ten. It was one of those early ‘I-didn’t-know-a-book-was-allowed-to-do this’ type of reads. It was funny and thoughtful and full of big ideas. It helped shape my sense of humour (and spawned some bad early writing when I tried to ape his style.) While the book was already over a decade old by the time I read it, it all felt very new. I’m glad I found it when I did. – Healthy living reporter Graham Isadore
Author and academic Robertson Davies sticks out his tongue at the photographer as he poses in his office in Toronto, May 26, 1993.Tibor Kolley/The Globe and Mail
Fifth Business, Robertson Davies
Published in 1970, Fifth Business made Robertson Davies an international name. There are many reasons to enjoy the novel about a history teacher named Dunstan Ramsay trying to prove his life was not an unremarkable one, contrary to an article in his school paper. There is Dunstan’s lifelong entanglement with two men he has known since growing up in small- town Ontario, one of whom becomes massively wealthy, the other a famous illusionist. There is one scene that is laugh-out-loud funny every time I read it (a lover’s quarrel and a prosthetic leg are the only spoilers I’ll give) and best of all, perhaps, is the concept of ‘Fifth Business’. Supposedly, it comes from the world of drama, where the role is that of someone who is not the hero or the villain but nevertheless essential to resolving the plot. I say ‘supposedly’ because Davies made it up. With so many people now trying to give main character energy, maybe they wouldn’t fret so much if they could just see the importance of Fifth Business. –Education reporter Dave McGinn
The Cat’s Table, Michael Ondaatje
I found The Cat’s Table in a bookshop in Colombo, the city of author Michael Ondaatje’s birth. Set aboard a ship in the 1950s, it is a story of journeys and passages: of an ocean liner sailing from Sri Lanka to England, of a gang of misfit children becoming adults. It’s about the passage of time itself, as the main character looks back years later at the eventful few weeks that changed his life. –Deputy foreign editor Hamida Ghafour
The Paper Bag Princess, Robert Munsch
Robert Munsch, pictured here in 2008, is one of Canada’s most celebrated children’s author. His book “The Paper Bag Princess” is among our favourites.Ashley Hutcheson/The Globe and Mail
Do not be fooled by its colourful illustrations and placement on children’s shelves: The Paper Bag Princess is a delightful read no matter your age. In a mere 500 words or so, Robert Munsch spins a story that is one part amusing fairy tale and one part feminist screed. Has any Canadian heroine ever uttered a more blistering put-down to a male character than, “You look like a real prince, but you are a bum”? I think not. – Editor Domini Clark
Ragged Company, Richard Wagamese
The story of four unhoused people winning the lottery is beautifully told, with rich, complex characters that are full of realistic nuance and relatability. What ties the whole narrative together is the question of how one defines a home, which is a particularly relevant questions for Canadians today (even though the book was written over 15 years ago) amid U.S. threats to absorb our country as the 51st American state. –Capital markets reporter Jameson Berkow
Why Rock the Boat?, William Weintraub
William Weintraub, pictured here in 2006, used his experience as a Montreal Gazette reporter to write Why Rock the Boat?Christinne Muschi/The Globe and Mail
Screwball comedy was long past its prime by 1961, but this novel – drawing from William Weintraub’s experiences as a Montreal Gazette reporter – gave it some new life on the page. There is enough evergreen humour that every reread gives me a chuckle, but it’s also a delightful time capsule of postwar Quebec as it shook off the moral straightjacket of generations past. -Digital editor Evan Annett
Dirty Birds, Morgan Murray
This quirky novel is hilariously dry and often laugh-out-loud funny. Author Morgan Murray pokes giant holes of fun at many coming-of-age rituals enjoyed by young Canadians. Slum living in student digs in Montreal? Check. Yearnings for a deep love connection with an untouchable art nerd? Check. Sightings of Leonard Cohen? Check. The anti-hero young poet (aptly named Milton Ontario) becomes an unlikely superstar in this novel with a thoroughly original sense of comedic timing. –Photo editor Clare Vander Meersch
Bear, Marian Engel
“Bear” proved that Canadians can be “a freak in the sheets,” says Globe editor Lisan Jutras.Supplied
At the age of 43, Engel finished a novel, her fifth. Against all odds (one rejection letter read “its extreme strangeness presents, I’m afraid, an insuperable obstacle”) it was published in 1976 and won that year’s Governor General’s Award. In Bear, the main character has a fling with the titular animal, and Engel does not stint on details. It’s explicit, intelligent, feminist and funny, and proved that this parochial Commonwealth could also be a freak in the sheets. –Editor Lisan Jutras
Louis Riel, Chester Brown
Beautifully illustrated and rigorously researched, Louis Riel is an unflinching look at one of the most impactful people in Canadian history, as well as the establishment of Manitoba and the creation of the Canadian Pacific Railway. It’s violent, complicated, and I can never put it down every time I pick it up. -Audience editor Jacob Dube
Shoeless Joe, W.P. Kinsella
Author W.P. Kinsella, pictured here in April 7, 1987, captured the power of the human spirit in his writing.
How many Canadian novels are so drenched in magic that they have become modern folk tales, woven into the fabric of American culture? Kinsella’s story of a farmer who plows under his cornfield to build a supernatural baseball diamond may take place on a farm in Iowa, but it lives in the hearts of anyone, anywhere, who longs to believe in imagination, redemption and the power of the human spirit. –Deputy head of newsroom development David Parkinson
In the Skin of a Lion, Michael Ondaatje
I grew up in Toronto and always thought it a perfectly livable burg, but it wasn’t until I read Ondaatje’s 1987 novel – a love story, a haunting mystery, a political tale of class revolt – that I began to realize the city might harbour its own epic mythology. Set in the 1920s and ‘30s, his tale weaves together real figures from history who envisioned a transformed city – enigmatic millionaire Ambrose Small, master builder R.C. Harris – and fictionalized versions of the immigrants who tunneled beneath Lake Ontario and soared into the sky to construct that modern dream. Read the novel then visit the landmarks – the magnificent Prince Edward Viaduct, the deco “palace of purification” that still processes almost half of the city’s drinking water – and think of all the stories this place has yet to tell. – Reporter and columnist Simon Houpt
Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel
Emily St. John Mandel, pictured here in L.A. March 30, 2022, weaves “unforgettable characters.”MORGAN LIEBERMAN/The Globe and Mail
On the face of it, my pick for favourite Canadian book is rather depressing and hits perhaps a little too close to home. After all, it’s about a respiratory virus-based global pandemic, with opening scenes in Toronto, and an ominous air throughout. But while it’s decidedly post-apocalyptic, its throughline is what we continue to value in the face of massive change, the connection and art that humans can’t help but crave, even when literally all else is lost. Weave in unforgettable characters that range in ages and backgrounds, writing that is at once illuminating and accessible, and descriptions of landscapes that feel like the baseline for any Canadian story, and you’ve got a book for the ages. (And if TV is more your thing, the show based on it is that rare achievement of being a singular story, while also complementary to the novel.) – Audience growth manager Rebecca Zamon