| 1. |
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The Love of a Good Woman
by Alice Munro
(Author) |
Amazon.ca Canadian Essential
Embraced by
neighbourhood book groups and avant-garde collectives alike, Alice
Munro is one of the world's masters of the short story. But the
astounding consistency of her imagination makes it difficult to pick
out one book that rises above the rest. You could hardly be faulted
for choosing her... Read more
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| 2. |
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St. Urbain's Horseman
by Mordecai Richler
(Author) |
Amazon.ca Canadian Essential
In St.
Urbain's Horseman, the brashness of youth, which propelled
Mordecai Richler's early novels like The Apprenticeship of Duddy
Kravitz, reckons with the weight of maturity and history. Jake
Hersh, an expatriate film director in England, driven by
dissatisfaction with his moderately successful... Read more
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| 3. |
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The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant
by
Mavis Gallant (Author) |
Amazon.ca Canadian Essential
Mavis Gallant
left Montreal for Paris in 1948, and it took some time, and dozens of
marvelous stories in The New Yorker, before her brilliance was
fully recognized in her home country. But with the publication of her
weighty and precise Selected Stories in 1996, her position as
one of the masters of... Read more
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| 4. |
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Emily of New Moon
by L.M. Montgomery
(Author), Alice Munro (Author) |
Amazon.ca Canadian Essential
Of course L.M.
Montgomery is still best known for her first novel, Anne of Green
Gables, likely the most famous (and best loved) Canadian book of
any kind. But many fans who have read further in her work come to love
her later Emily books even more. Beginning with 1924's Emily of New
Moon, their... Read more
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| 5. |
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The Game, 20th Anniversary Edition
by Ken
Dryden (Author) |
Amazon.ca Canadian Essential
No one who has
read The Game could have been surprised when, 20 years after
its publication, its author, Canadiens Hall of Fame goalie Ken Dryden,
became a member of Parliament. Relentlessly analytical and
patiently--sometimes lyrically--observant, Dryden was always a
singular figure even within the... Read more
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| 6. |
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Neuromancer
by William Gibson (Author) |
Amazon.ca Canadian Essential
When
Neuromancer, a first novel by a young American transplanted
to Vancouver, appeared in 1984, it was immediately recognized as the
first shot in a science fiction revolution. Innovative in both style
and substance, Gibson's tale of a hired-gun hacker caught the spirit
of the coming networked... Read more
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| 7. |
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The Wars
by Timothy Findley (Author) |
Amazon.ca Canadian Essential
Sixty years
after the armistice, the horrors of the First World War were still
spurring antiwar literature, one of the most compelling of which is
Timothy Findley's The Wars. Slim and elliptical, but told with
a level-headed, lyrical clarity, The Wars traces the atrocities
and absurdities of war... Read more
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| 8. |
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The Canadian Oxford Dictionary (Second Edition)
by Katherine Barber (Author) |
Amazon.ca Canadian Essential
When the
Canadian Oxford Dictionary was first released in 1998, it was
a publishing phenomenon. Quickly recognized as a landmark record of
Canadian English, it stayed on bestseller lists for over a year and
immediately became the standard dictionary reference across Canada.
Updated since, it... Read more
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| 9. |
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Planet Earth: Poems Selected and New
by P.K.
Page |
Amazon.ca Canadian Essential
P.K. Page has
been publishing poetry for over 60 years. In that time, she has
created a body of work that is vaster in scope and variety than that
of any other poet writing in English in Canada. Planet Earth
collects the best of Page's poems--anthologized favourites and
overlooked jewels alike--into... Read more
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| 10. |
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Anatomy of Criticism
by Northrop Frye
(Author) |
Amazon.ca Canadian Essential
Northrop Frye's
Anatomy of Criticism is one of a handful of midcentury works of
literary criticism (Eric Auerbach's Mimesis is another) that
tower over the field with a range of learning and an imaginative,
systematizing authority that are nearly unthinkable to readers from a
later, more fragmented... Read more
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| 11. |
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Canada Made Me
by Norman Levine (Author)
|
Amazon.ca Canadian Essential
In 1956 Norman
Levine, seven years an expatriate in England, returned by ship for an
unsentimental journey through his native land. Drawn with a fierce
bohemianism toward the bottom rungs of Canadian society--the beer
parlours, the bunkhouses filled with immigrant miners, the cheap
flophouses with... Read more
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| 12. |
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Alligator Pie
by Dennis Lee, Frank Newfeld
|
Amazon.ca Canadian Essential
Dennis Lee won
the Governor General's Award for poetry in 1972 for his poetic
meditation on Canadian identity in Civil Elegies, but he made
perhaps his most enduring contribution to Canadian nationalism two
years later with a short collection of near-nonsense rhymes written
for a much younger set. ... Read more
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| 13. |
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Black Robe
by Brian Moore (Author) |
Amazon.ca Canadian Essential
A Belfast native
who immigrated to Canada in the 1940s and then retained Canadian
citizenship as he continued his travels, Brian Moore was a master of
both the domestic drama, like his early Lonely Passion of Judith
Hearne, and the political thriller, as in his marvellously
economical novels like ... Read more
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| 14. |
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In the Skin of a Lion
by Michael Ondaatje
(Author) |
Amazon.ca Canadian Essential
From the jazz
obsessions of Buddy Bolden in Coming Through Slaughter to the
ministrations of the physician Gamini in Anil's Ghost and the
craftperson's shared curiosity in The Conversations, Michael
Ondaatje has always been a poet of work as much as love, and never
more so than in In the Skin of a... Read more
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| 15. |
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The Siren Years: A Canadian Diplomat Abroad, 1937-1945
by Charles Ritchie (Author) |
Amazon.ca Canadian Essential
Encouraged by
the novelist Elizabeth Bowen, longtime Canadian diplomat Charles
Ritchie released his wartime journals after his retirement in 1974,
and in that volume and the three that followed, he established himself
as the greatest of Canadian diarists. Witty and well-connected,
Ritchie brings a... Read more
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| 16. |
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The Tin Flute
by Gabrielle Roy (Author),
Philip Stratford (Author) |
Amazon.ca Canadian Essential
Set amid the
poverty of Montreal during the late Depression and the threat of
conscription from the coming European war, Gabrielle Roy's The Tin
Flute was immediately recognized as a landmark by French readers
and, soon after, English ones as well. It has remained a certified
classic and a staple of... Read more
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| 17. |
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The Handmaid's Tale
by Margaret Atwood
(Author) |
Amazon.ca Canadian Essential
Written in 1985,
Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale imagines a near future quite
different than the one George Orwell had predicted for the previous
year, but her novel has joined 1984 as one of the classics of
dystopian literature. Her vision is of a United States transformed
into the Republic of... Read more
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| 18. |
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On the Take: Crime, Corruption and Greed in the Mulroney
Years
by Stevie Cameron (Author) |
Amazon.ca Canadian Essential
Published in
1994, a year after Brian Mulroney left office after nearly a decade in
power, On the Take is investigative journalist Stevie Cameron's
blistering account of the corruption of the Mulroney years. Told with
the verve (and the glee) of a thriller, On the Take, with its
details of backroom... Read more
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| 19. |
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Fifth Business
by Robertson Davies (Author)
|
Amazon.ca Canadian Essential
Robertson Davies
had long been known in Canada as a newspaper journalist and
playwright, but after Fifth Business appeared in 1970, he soon
became one of Canada's most internationally admired novelists. The
first book in Davies's Deptford Trilogy, Fifth Business
is a charming and thematically... Read more
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| 20. |
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No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies
by
Naomi Klein (Author) |
Amazon.ca Canadian Essential
Toronto Star
columnist Naomi Klein's No Logo, published at the very end of
1999, caught the imagination of the next millennium's first generation
of activists, becoming the bible for the international
anti-globalization movement. Documenting the ubiquity of brand
identities and the harsh labour... Read more
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| 21. |
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The Last Crossing
by Guy Vanderhaeghe
(Author) |
Amazon.ca Canadian Essential
Set on the
Canadian and American frontier borderlands at the end of the 19th
century, Guy Vanderhaeghe's Last Crossing is both an
old-fashioned Western tale of adventure and character and a thoroughly
modern, multi-voiced story of cultural conflict. Vanderhaeghe's
powerful storytelling and his... Read more
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| 22. |
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The Colony of Unrequited Dreams
by Wayne
Johnston (Author) |
Amazon.ca Canadian Essential
In The Colony
of Unrequited Dreams, Wayne Johnston transforms the story of
longtime Newfoundland premier Joey Smallwood into a vastly inventive
drama of ambition, history, and landscape, aided by the entirely
fictional creation of Sheilagh Fielding: unconsummated love interest,
eccentric journalist,... Read more
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| 23. |
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Salvage King, Ya!
by Mark Anthony Jarman
(Author) |
Amazon.ca Canadian Essential
Mark Jarman has
a voice you'd follow anywhere, and in Salvage King, Ya!, his
"herky-jerky picaresque" about a journeyman defenceman doing his best
not to settle down, you do. Driven and drifting across the continent
as pro, semipro, and finally ex-hockey player, his hero Drinkwater
oscillates... Read more
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| 24. |
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The Group of Seven and Tom Thomson
by David
P. Silcox (Author) |
Amazon.ca Canadian Essential
The paintings of
the Group of Seven and their precursor Tom Thomson have defined for
nearly a century not only the landscape of Canadian art, but the
Canadian landscape itself, by creating more than anyone else the
collective imagination of our home and native land. David Silcox's
gorgeously... Read more
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| 25. |
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A Season in the Life of Emmanuel
by
Marie-Claire Blais (Author), Nicole Brossard (Author) |
Amazon.ca Canadian Essential
In 1965, six
years after she burst into notoriety at the age of 20 for her
disturbing debut novel, Mad Shadows, Marie-Claire Blais
returned with the equally harrowing Season in the Life of Emmanuel.
Following the stifled fortunes of a poor, immense farm family in her
unnamed but unmistakable native... Read more
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| 26. |
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Such a Long Journey
by Rohinton Mistry
(Author) |
Amazon.ca Canadian Essential
Rohinton
Mistry's fame has only increased with each of his novels, but his
first remains his best. Such a Long Journey sees India's crisis
with Pakistan in 1971 and the corruption of the Gandhi regime through
the life of a Bombay bank clerk, with the attention to character and
story that have made... Read more
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| 27. |
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Frontenac: The Courtier Governor
by W. J.
Eccles (Author), Peter Moogk (Introduction) |
Amazon.ca Canadian Essential
With his 1959
biography, Frontenac: The Courtier Governor, W.J. Eccles
overturned received opinion on not just his subject but on the entire
history of New France, transforming an icon into a (rather corrupt and
self-aggrandizing) human and bringing his great storytelling gifts to
the vital events... Read more
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| 28. |
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The Double Hook
by Sheila Watson (Author),
F.T. Flahiff (Author) |
Amazon.ca Canadian Essential
Sheila Watson's
The Double Hook and Ray Smith's Cape Breton Is the Thought
Control Centre of Canada are the twin fountainheads of
experimental fiction in Canada. A McLuhan protégé, steeped in the
formal adventures of international modernism, Watson brought a new
sophistication to Canadian... Read more
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| 29. |
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Rooms for Rent in the Outer Planets: Selected Poems,
1962-1996
by Al Purdy (Author) |
Amazon.ca Canadian Essential
Rooms for
Rent in the Outer Planets culls the cream from Al Purdy's prolific
career. Writing with a free, colloquial style that some have argued
has been the ruin of Canadian poetry but that, at its finest and most
focused, gathers a remarkable garrulous charm, Purdy creates one of
the most... Read more
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| 30. |
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Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town
by Stephen
Leacock (Author), Jack Hodgins (Author) |
Amazon.ca Canadian Essential
Comedy is hard,
and writing comedy that lasts is even harder, as the list of largely
forgotten winners of the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour will tell
you (Pardon My Parka, anyone?). Which is why the continued
popularity for nearly a century of Leacock's own
Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town is... Read more
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| 31. |
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Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the
Modern Age
by Modris Eksteins (Author) |
Amazon.ca Canadian Essential
The First World
War has retained a special fascination for Canadian writers and
scholars, and in Rites of Spring, University of Toronto
historian Modris Eksteins contributed one of the most masterful
studies of the culture of the war and its era. Eksteins does his time
in the trenches, but he... Read more
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| 32. |
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The seasons of a fisherman: A flyfisher's classic
evocations of spring, summer, fall, and winter fishing
by Roderick L Haig-Brown (Author) |
Amazon.ca Canadian Essential
It's fitting
that someone so well-rounded as Roderick Haig-Brown--public
administrator and private writer, naturalist and humane
bureaucrat--would be best remembered for a book called Seasons of a
Fisherman. Collecting his four seasonal angling memoirs written
between 1951 and 1964, Seasons easily... Read more
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| 33. |
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As for Me and My House
by Sinclair Ross
(Author), Robert Kroetsch (Author) |
Amazon.ca Canadian Essential
Largely ignored
when it appeared in 1941 (the Governor General's Award that year went
to Alan Sullivan's since-forgotten Three Came to Ville Marie),
Sinclair Ross's first novel, As for Me and My House, has since
become recognized as the great Anglo-Canadian novel of the Depression
era. Ross's story... Read more
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| 34. |
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For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down
by David
Adams Richards (Author) |
Amazon.ca Canadian Essential
David Adams
Richards has always been refreshingly direct about confronting moral
issues in a way that just isn't done any more. In the case of For
Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down, the third and best book in his
startlingly good Miramichi trilogy, it's Jerry Bines, a violent man,
feared by his town,... Read more
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| 35. |
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The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographical Man
by Marshall McLuhan (Author) |
Amazon.ca Canadian Essential
Nearly every
decade has its own claim to a revolution that is the biggest since the
invention of the printing press. Well, what was that original
revolution, still the defending champion of cultural upheavals,
actually like? In The Gutenberg Galaxy, University of Toronto
theorist Marshall McLuhan... Read more
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| 36. |
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The Complete Writings of Emily Carr
by Emily
Carr (Author) |
Amazon.ca Canadian Essential
Emily Carr is in
the encyclopedias as a painter first, writer second, but she was an
original in both fields, and many prefer her writing. Nearly all
autobiographical and anecdotal, her books, seven of which can be found
in The Collected Writings, are told with a good-natured, witty
directness.... Read more
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| 37. |
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The Meeting Point
by Austin Clarke (Author)
|
Amazon.ca Canadian Essential
Decades before
The Polished Hoe made him a household name, Austin Clarke was
publishing extraordinary fiction. The Meeting Point, a harsh
and poignant account of the lives of Barbadian immigrants in the
white-dominated and socially ossified Toronto of the 1960s, is still a
powerfully subversive... Read more
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| 38. |
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Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World
by Margaret Macmillan (Author), Richard Holbrooke (Author)
|
Amazon.ca Canadian Essential
University of
Toronto historian Margaret MacMillan failed at first to find a
Canadian publisher for her account of the pivotal peace conference
that followed the First World War and, some have said, laid the
groundwork for the second, but when Paris 1919 won the Samuel
Johnson Prize in the U.K., it... Read more
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| 39. |
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The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches
by Gaétan Soucy (Author) |
Amazon.ca Canadian Essential
Anglophone
Canadians are very good at ignoring the literature of their
francophone neighbours. It is becoming increasingly difficult to
ignore the novels of Gaétan Soucy. Stunningly written, morally
sophisticated, and conceived with an often brutal savagery, Soucy's
novels rank with the world's... Read more
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| 40. |
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The Last Light of the Sun
by Guy Gavriel Kay
(Author) |
Amazon.ca Canadian Essential
From his very
first books, the trilogy known as the Fionavar Tapestry, Guy Gavriel
Kay was recognized as one of the world's finest and most innovative
writers working with the fantasy tradition. In later works he has
taken on, with striking success, an alternative history of Europe,
which reached a... Read more
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| 41. |
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The Last Spike: The Great Railway, 1881-1885
by Pierre Berton (Author) |
Amazon.ca Canadian Essential
His books are so
omnipresent and wide-ranging that one would be forgiven for thinking
that the prolific Pierre Berton was the sole chronicler of Canada's
history. Berton found his ideal subject in one of the greatest dramas
of the developing nation: the building of the Canadian Pacific
Railway. It... Read more
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| 42. |
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Silverwing (Silverwing, Book 1)
by Kenneth
Oppel (Author) |
Amazon.ca Canadian Essential
One of Canada's
best books for young readers was written by a pretty young writer
himself. Kenneth Oppel, who had his first book published when he was
18, really hit his stride a dozen years later with
Silverwing, the first volume in a thrilling adventure trilogy
set in the nocturnal world of bats... Read more
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| 43. |
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Lament for a nation: The defeat of Canadian nationalism
by George Grant (Author) |
Amazon.ca Canadian Essential
In proclaiming
the "defeat of Canadian nationalism," philosopher George Grant's
Lament for a Nation became one of the central texts of the
nationalist movement of the 1960s and '70s, arguing that Canadian
identity had been undermined by the economic and technical domination
of the United States.... Read more
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| 44. |
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For a Modest God: New and Selected Poems
by
Eric Ormsby (Author) |
Amazon.ca Canadian Essential
Eric Ormsby
didn't publish his first book of poetry until the age of 49, but he
hardly came to his craft empty-handed: his resume lists a stellar
career as professor and curator of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton
and McGill and a professional interest in the question of evil. And
the poems... Read more
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| 45. |
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Memoirs
by Pierre Trudeau (Author) |
Amazon.ca Canadian Essential
Charismatic,
bicultural, and intellectual, Pierre Trudeau was the towering figure
of the Canadian 20th century. For a complete picture of his legacy one
can look to his influential early political essays and to the
excellent biographies by Richard Gwyn as well as Christina McCall and
Stephen... Read more
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| 46. |
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Life of Pi
by Yann Martel (Author) |
Amazon.ca Canadian Essential
Yann Martel's
second novel, Life of Pi, appeared in Canada in 2001 to
enthusiastic reviews and moderate sales. A year later, it came out of
nowhere to win the Booker Prize and became an international publishing
phenomenon (and Amazon.ca's first blockbuster). In a wonderful display
of storytelling... Read more
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| 47. |
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My New York Diary
by Julie Doucet (Author)
|
Amazon.ca Canadian Essential
With her
confrontationally intimate comic book serial Dirty Plotte,
Julie Doucet became one of the first stars of Montreal's
groundbreaking comics publisher, Drawn & Quarterly. 1999's My New
York Diary collects her most extended storyline, of an unhappy
sojourn in New York, along with earlier... Read more
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| 48. |
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The Dispossessed: Life and Death in Native Canada
by Geoffrey York (Author) |
Amazon.ca Canadian Essential
From exploited
lands and broken and ignored treaties to forced dislocations and
residential schools, the history of Canada's dealings with the native
peoples who share its land is a terrible one. Journalist Geoffrey
York's The Dispossessed is a classic pre-Oka Crisis survey of
that bitter legacy. Read more
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| 49. |
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Lost in the Barrens
by Farley Mowat (Author)
|
Amazon.ca Canadian Essential
No single book
could represent such a singular, widely curious figure as Farley Mowat,
but Lost in the Barrens, the classic adventure tale that has
introduced his work to generations of Canadians, is an excellent place
to start. Set in the icy North that has been Mowat's continuing source
of... Read more
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| 50. |
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Swann
by Carol Shields (Author) |
Amazon.ca Canadian Essential
Carol Shields is
best known, of course, for her prize-sweeping Stone Diaries and
her moving fictional coda, Unless, but many Shields fans have a
lesser-known favourite: Swann, the 1987 novel that was
originally published as a mystery (and won an Arthur Ellis Award as
such) but that is the equal of... Read more |
