Canadian Books

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COLIN McADAM’s last novel, A Beautiful Truth, won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. It was also a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award and named a Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year. His first novel, Some Great Thing, won the Amazon/Books in Canada First Novel Award and was nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Award, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in the U.K. His second novel, Fall, was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and awarded the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennon Prize. He lives in Chelsea, Quebec.

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RAWI HAGE was born in Beirut, Lebanon, and lived through nine years of the Lebanese civil war during the 1970s and 1980s. He immigrated to Canada in 1992 and now lives in Montreal. His first novel, De Niro's Game, won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for the best English-language book published anywhere in the world in a given year, and has either won or been shortlisted for seven other major awards and prizes, including the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Governor General's Literary Award. Cockroach was the winner of the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and a finalist for the Governor General's Award. It was also shortlisted for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Award and the Giller Prize. His third novel, Carnival, told from the perspective of a taxi driver, was a finalist for the Writers' Trust Award and won the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction. His work has been translated into 30 languages.

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Miriam Toews is the author of seven bestselling novels: Women Talking, All My Puny Sorrows, Summer of My Amazing Luck, A Boy of Good Breeding, A Complicated Kindness, The Flying Troutmans, and Irma Voth, and one work of non-fiction, Swing Low: A Life.  She is a winner of the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, the Libris Award for Fiction Book of the Year, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and the Writers Trust Marian Engel/Timothy Findley Award. She lives in Toronto. 

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Miriam Toews is the author of seven bestselling novels: Women Talking, All My Puny Sorrows, Summer of My Amazing Luck, A Boy of Good Breeding, A Complicated Kindness, The Flying Troutmans, and Irma Voth, and one work of non-fiction, Swing Low: A Life.  She is a winner of the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, the Libris Award for Fiction Book of the Year, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and the Writers Trust Marian Engel/Timothy Findley Award. She lives in Toronto. 

“The Boy in Number Four had a passion and a dream … to one day be a player on a big league hockey team.” It takes hard work and dedication to make it to the big league, but those aren’t the only things that are important. Respect, determination and the sheer thrill of the game brought Bobby Orr from a small northern town in Canada to one of the best teams in the NHL. Using Bobby Orr and his journey as a model, The Boy in Number Four celebrates the game of hockey—from backyard rinks to the big leagues. A book for hockey enthusiasts of all ages!

Together in a single volume, two beloved novels by one of our most celebrated and important writers.

Tuyen is an aspiring artist and the daughter of Vietnamese parents who've never recovered from losing one of their children while in the rush to flee Vietnam in the 1970s. She rejects her immigrant family's hard-won lifestyle, and instead lives in a rundown apartment with friends-each of whom is grappling with their own familial complexities and heartache.
     By turns thrilling and heartbreaking, Tuyen's lost brother--who has since become a criminal in the Thai underworld--journeys to Toronto to find his long-lost family. As Quy's arrival nears, tensions build, friendships are tested, and an unexpected encounter will forever alter the lives of Tuyen and her friends. Gripping at times, heartrending at others, What We All Long For is an ode to a generation of longing and identity, and to the rhythms and pulses of a city and its burgeoning, questioning youth. Winner of the Toronto Book Award.
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In Love Enough, the sharp beauty of Brand's writing draws us effortlessly into the intersecting stories of her characters caught in the middle of choices, apprehensions, fears. Each of the tales here--June's, Bedri's, Da'uud's, Lia's opens a different window on the city they all live in, mostly in parallel, but occasionally, delicately, touching and crossing one another. Each story radiates other stories. In these pages, the urban landscape cannot be untangled from the emotional one; they mingle, shift and cleave to one another.
     The young man Bedri experiences the terrible isolation brought about by an act of violence, while his father, Da'uud, casualty of a geopolitical conflict, driving a taxi, is witness to curious gestures of love and anger; Lia faces the sometimes unbridgeable chasms of family; and fierce June, ambivalent and passionate with her string of lovers, now in middle age discovers: "There is nothing universal or timeless about this love business. It is hard if you really want to do it right." At once lucid and dream-like, Love Enough is a profoundly modern work that speaks to the most fundamental questions of how we live now.

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DIONNE BRAND’s literary credentials are legion. Her latest novel, Theory, won the 2019 OCM BOCAS Prize for Caribbean Literature, and was a Globe and Mail Best Book. Her latest poetry collection, The Blue Clerk, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and won the Trillium Book Prize. Her collection Ossuaries won the Griffin Poetry Prize, and other collections have won the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Trillium Book Award and the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. Among her novels, In Another Place, Not Here was selected as a NYT Book Review Notable Book and a Best Book by the Globe and Mail; At the Full and Change of the Moon was selected a Best Book by the LA Times; and What We All Long For won the Toronto Book Award. In 2006, Brand was awarded the Harbourfront Festival Prize for her contribution to the world of books and writing, and from 2009 to 2012 she served as Toronto’s Poet Laureate. In 2017, she was named to the Order of Canada. Brand is a Professor in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph. She lives in Toronto.

 When Marilla Cuthbert and her brother, Matthew, decide to adopt a child from a distant orphanage, they don't get quite what they bargained for. The child who awaits them at the tiny Bright River train station is not the strapping young boy they'd imagined--someone to help Matthew work the fields of their small farm--but rather a freckle-faced, redheaded girl named Anne (with an e, if you please).
     Matthew and Marilla may not be sure about Anne, but Anne takes one look at Prince Edward Island's red clay roads and the Cuthberts' snug white farmhouse with its distinctive green gables and decides that she's home at last. But will she be able to convince Marilla and Matthew to let her stay?
   Armed with only a battered carpetbag and a boundless imagination, Anne charms her way into the Cuthberts' hearts--and into the hearts of readers as well. She truly is, in the words of Mark Twain, "the dearest and most lovable child in fiction since the immortal Alice."

Lucy Maud Montgomery (November 30, 1874 – April 24, 1942), was a Canadian author best known for her series of novels beginning with Anne of Green Gables, which was an immediate success. The first novel was followed by a series of sequels with Anne as the central character. Montgomery went on to publish 20 novels as well as 500 short stories and poems. She was born on Prince Edward Island, Canada.

As a Crown Attorney working with First Nations in remote northwestern Ontario, Rupert Ross learned that he was routinely misinterpreting the behaviour of Aboriginal victims, witnesses, and offenders, both in and out of court. He discovered that he regularly drew wrong conclusions when he encountered witnesses who wouldn’t make eye contact, victims who wouldn’t testify in the presence of the accused, and parents who showed great reluctance to interfere in their children’s offending behaviour. With the assistance of Aboriginal teachers, he began to see that behind such behaviour lay a complex web of coherent cultural commandments that he had never suspected, much less understood.

As his awareness of traditional Native teachings grew, he found that the areas of miscommunication extended well beyond the courtroom, causing cross-cultural misunderstanding—and ill-informed condemnation.

Dancing with a Ghost is Ross’s attempt to give some definition to the cultural gap that bedevils the relationships and distorts the communications between Native peoples and the dominant white Canadian society—and to encourage others to begin their own respectful cross-cultural explorations. As Ross discovered, traditional perspectives have a great deal to offer modern-day Canada, not only in the context of justice but also in terms of the broader concepts of peaceful social organization and personal fulfilment.

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RUPERT ROSS is a retired assistant Crown Attorney for the District of Kenora, Ontario. Starting in 1985, he conducted criminal prosecutions for more than twenty remote Ojibway and Cree First Nations communities in northwestern Ontario. His first book, Dancing with a Ghost, started his exploration of aboriginal visions of existence and became a bestseller. His second book, Returning to the Teachings, was also a bestseller and examined the aboriginal preference for the “peacemaker justice” he observed during a three-year secondment with Justice Canada. Both books were shortlisted for the Gordon Montour Award for the best Canadian non-fiction book on social issues, and are presently used in universities and colleges across North America. Following his retirement, Ross was awarded the prestigious 2011 National Prosecution Award for Humanitarianism, and the Ontario Crown Attorneys Association has created an award named after him. He continues to live just north of Kenora with his wife, Val.

In their various locales--from Montreal (where a prosthetic leg casts a furious spell on its beholders) to New Mexico (where a Soviet-era exchange student redefines home for his hosts)--the characters in Babylon are coming to terms with life's epiphanies, for good or ill.

They range from the very young who, confronted with their parents' limitations, discover their own resolve, to those facing middle age and its particular indignities, no less determined to assert themselves and shape their destinies. Babylon and Other Stories showcases the wit, humor, and insight that have made Alix Ohlin one of the most admired young writers working today.

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Alix Ohlin is the author of six books, including Dual Citizens, which was short-listed for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, and many other places. She lives in Vancouver, where she is the Director of the UBC School of Creative Writing.

Vanishing and Other Stories explores emotional and physical absences, the ways in which people leave, are left, and whether or not it's ever possible to move on. Readers will encounter a skinny ice-cream scooper named Nina Simone, a vanishing visionary of social utopia, a French teacher who collects fiancés, and a fortune-telling mother who fails to predict the heartbreak of her own daughter. The characters in this collection will linger in the imagination, proving that nothing is ever truly forgotten.…

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Vanishing and Other Stories explores emotional and physical absences, the ways in which people leave, are left, and whether or not it's ever possible to move on. Readers will encounter a skinny ice-cream scooper named Nina Simone, a vanishing visionary of social utopia, a French teacher who collects fiancés, and a fortune-telling mother who fails to predict the heartbreak of her own daughter. The characters in this collection will linger in the imagination, proving that nothing is ever truly forgotten.…