Canadian Literature
The Canadian Literature Collection highlights the diversity and talent of Canadian authors. Representing the broad range of genres and traditions reflected in Candian Literature, this Collection includes fiction by Margaret Atwood, John Irving, Lucy Maud Montgomery, and other Canadian writers who have shaped the nation's literary canon.
12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (2018) is Jordan B. Peterson’s second book. Peterson’s self-help book seeks to provide practical and virtuous rules to live by for a wide audience and general readership. The book streamlines, simplifies, and reimagines some of the more traditionally academic topics of Peterson’s first book, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief. Each non-fiction work aims to explain human history and human nature according to universal frameworks. 12... Read 12 Rules for Life Summary
Acceleration (2003) is a young adult novel by Graham McNamee. Narrated in the first person, it tells the story of 17-year-old Duncan as he learns of a potential serial killer in his city and his attempt to stop him. It examines themes of guilt, forgiveness, mental health, poverty, and more. Plot SummaryThe story opens with 17-year-old Duncan working a two-month stint at a lost and found, his boss being a quiet man named Jacob. The... Read Acceleration Summary
Miriam Toews’s A Complicated Kindness (2004) is about Nomi Nickel, an adolescent living in the religious Mennonite town of East Village whose coming of age takes place against the backdrop of her family’s unraveling. Toews, who grew up in the Mennonite community of Steinbach, Manitoba, is the author of several novels set in Mennonite communities, many of which are critical of aspects of the faith. This novel, Toews’s third, has garnered considerable acclaim and many... Read A Complicated Kindness Summary
Indian-born Canadian writer Rohinton Mistry’s 1995 novel A Fine Balance is the story of four characters from diverse backgrounds whose paths converge in 1975 India. Maneck Kohlah, a college student, has rented a room in the city. On his way to inspect the apartment of Dina Dalal, he meets two tailors, Ishvar Darji and his nephew Omprakash (Om) Darji, also on their way to Dina’s to find sewing jobs.Dina hires the tailors to work from... Read A Fine Balance Summary
A Great Reckoning (2016) is the 12th novel in the Inspector Gamache series. The series consists of contemporary mysteries written by the Canadian author Louise Penny. Like the other novels in the series, A Great Reckoning revolves around the small village of Three Pines, Quebec, and its inhabitants. The novel includes a standalone murder mystery plot and references to events in other novels within the series; Penny explores themes of parenthood, loss, and betrayal. This... Read A Great Reckoning Summary
A House in the Sky is a memoir co-written by Amanda Lindhout and Sara Corbett, published in 2013. The book recounts Lindhout’s experience as a Canadian journalist who was kidnapped and held captive in Somalia for 460 days. The memoir delves deep into The Psychological Impact of Captivity, exploring how Lindhout coped with the severe conditions she faced by holding on to hope and using survival strategies that centered around mental resilience and the creation... Read A House in the Sky Summary
Airborn is a 2004 Young Adult steampunk adventure novel by Canadian author Kenneth Oppel. Airborn is the first in Oppel’s Matt Cruse series, which would go on to include Skybreaker (2005) and Starclimber (2008). Airborn follows the adventures of Matt Cruse, a cabin boy on the airship Aurora. With passenger and love interest Kate de Vries, Matt discovers a previously unknown creature on an island in the Pacifica, the in-world version of the Pacific Ocean... Read Airborn Summary
Is Grace Marks a murderess or an innocent pawn? Is she an evil fiend or mentally ill? Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace (1996) retells the story of Canada’s notorious nineteenth-century convicted murderess Grace Marks. Grounded in the historical record where available, Atwood’s novel probes issues of gender and class roles, identity, truth, and the nature of memory. Thomas Kinnear, a wealthy landowner, and Nancy Montgomery, his housekeeper and mistress, are murdered in July 1843. Grace, who... Read Alias Grace Summary
"All the Years of Her Life" is a short story by Canadian author Morley Callaghan, first published in his collection Now That April’s Here and Other Stories in 1936. Set in a drugstore in an unknown city, it centers around a young man named Alfred Higgins, who is caught by his boss stealing items from his workplace. Instead of calling the police, the owner, Mr. Carr, calls Alfred’s mother to discuss her son’s actions. Exploring... Read All the Years of Her Life Summary
American War is a speculative fiction novel published in 2017 by the Canadian-Egyptian author Omar El Akkad. Set is a dystopian near-future in which climate change has displaced millions, the book details a Second American Civil War fought between the federal government and the Southern United States over the use of fossil fuels. Prior to writing American War, El Akkad reported from conflict zones in Afghanistan and Egypt as a journalist for The Globe and... Read American War Summary
A New Earth: Create a Better Life by Eckart Tolle was originally published in 2005 with the title A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose. The book followed in the wake of Tolle’s seminal 1997 work The Power of Now, which discusses the potential inherent in the present moment and suggests that the destructive voice in our heads, which causes us to be constantly dissatisfied and compare ourselves to others, is the ego and... Read A New Earth Summary
In Anil’s Ghost, Michael Ondaatje explores the trauma of the Sri Lankan civil war of the 1980s and 1990s. Anil Tissera, a forensic pathologist who works with human rights organizations, returns to her home country of Sri Lanka after an absence of 15 years. As part of an investigation into government-sponsored violence against citizens Anil and her team discover, at a sixth-century burial site, what appears to be a recently murdered body, which they name... Read Anil's Ghost Summary
Anne of Avonlea, the second novel in the Anne of Green Gables series, is the heralded sequel that brings readers back to the second chapter in Anne Shirley’s life from age 16 to 18. First published in 1909 by Canadian author L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Avonlea is set in the latter part of the 19th century in fictional Avonlea, a small town on Prince Edward Island, Canada. Filled with many familiar characters from the first... Read Anne of Avonlea Summary
Anne of Green Gables is a world-renowned classic children’s novel first published in 1908 by Canadian author L. M. Montgomery. Set in the latter part of the 19th century in fictional Avonlea, a small town on Prince Edward Island, Canada, the story follows the accidental arrival of a precocious 11-year-old orphan girl, Anne Shirley, at Green Gables, the family homestead of middle-aged siblings Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert. Many mishaps, adventures, and ultimate successes follow Anne... Read Anne Of Green Gables Summary
John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989) is the novelist’s seventh and best-selling novel to date. Through a series of flashbacks, it tells the story of an unusually small boy with a strange voice named Owen Meany who believes himself to be specially chosen by God. Narrated by John Wheelwright, Owen’s best friend, the narrative alternates between the past—which begins in 1950s New Hampshire and extends to the late 1960s—and the present, Toronto in... Read A Prayer for Owen Meany Summary
This study guide refers to the 2004 House of Anansi edition of Ronald Wright’s A Short History of Progress. The book is a printed version of five Massey Lectures that Wright delivered in Canada in 2004. Wright is a Canadian author of historical fiction and non-fiction with a background in archaeology, anthropology, and linguistics. This lecture series uses Wright’s unique set of skills as a storyteller and student of history to provide a sweeping and... Read A Short History of Progress Summary
A Tale for the Time Being is a 2013 work of literary fiction written by Japanese-American novelist Ruth Ozeki. Told in four parts, the book goes back and forth between the stories of two protagonists: sixteen-year-old Naoko “Nao” Yasutani, who is writing about her life in Tokyo during the early 2000s, and Ruth, a Japanese-American novelist living on an island off the coast of Western Canada. Ruth finds Nao’s diary on the beach shortly after... Read A Tale For The Time Being Summary
Anne Carson's Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse reimagines the myth of Herakles and Geryon, the red winged monster whom Herakles slays in his tenth labor. Carson bases her version on fragments of the epic poem by Ancient Greek poet Stesichoros. Stesichoros' version of Herakles' tenth labor is unique in that it is told not from Herakles' perspective, but from "Geryon's own experience" (6). Using this as inspiration, Carson retells Geryon and Herakles' story... Read Autobiography Of Red Summary
Black Robe is a 1985 historical fiction novel written by Brian Moore. It is set in the 17th century and tracks the journey of two Europeans—one of whom is a Jesuit priest—in New France. The two men find themselves caught between the two cultures shortly after the time of the first contact. Plot SummaryFather Laforgue awaits his orders from the Commandant of the new settlement of Québec, a small village that is home to around 100... Read Black Robe Summary
Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, Malcolm Gladwell's 2005 New York Times bestseller, describes how snap judgments, first impressions, and intuitions can be more useful than painstaking rational thought.Blink contains three central ideas: “fast and frugal" thinking is a natural attribute of the human mind and often works better than slow-and-careful reasoning; this ability can be distorted or misled; and fast cognition can be trained and improved. The book’s six chapters provide examples from... Read Blink Summary
Gordan Korman’s 2006 young adult coming-of-age novel Born to Rock follows teenager Leo Caraway as he sets out to get to know his biological father—the frontman of a legendary punk rock band—hoping to fund his college tuition while navigating the foreign world of punk rock and gets to know his roots. The novel, which was written for and dedicated to Korman’s son, also named Leo, explores themes of genetics, identity, self-expression, and lying.Korman is a... Read Born to Rock Summary
Alice Munro’s “Boys and Girls” was first published as an individual story in 1964 and was also included in Munro’s 1968 collection, Dance of the Happy Shades. The story takes place at one home in rural Canada, and the narrator, a soon to be 11-year-old girl, carefully describes her father’s work as a fox farmer. The work is seasonal, but the narrator begins in the “several weeks before Christmas” when her father would begin the... Read Boys And Girls Summary
Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring was published in 1998. The science fiction novel was the winner of several awards that include the Warner Aspect First Novel Contest, the Locus Award for Best First Novel, and the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Set after the Riots in Toronto that splintered the city into the impoverished center and wealthier surrounding suburbs, the novel follows the spiritual and personal journey of Ti-Jeanne, an... Read Brown Girl in the Ring Summary
Bury Your Dead is a 2010 mystery novel in Louise Penny’s long-running Inspector Gamache series, the immediate sequel to 2009’s The Brutal Telling. The Gamache novels of Penny, a former broadcast journalist, have received critical acclaim, including multiple Agatha Awards for Best Mystery Novel of the Year and the Anthony Awards from the Mystery Writers of America. The most recent installment in the series, A World of Curiosities, was published in 2022.Content Warning: The source... Read Bury Your Dead Summary
Cat’s Eye is a 1988 coming-of-age novel by Canadian author Margaret Atwood that centers on Elaine Risley, a successful painter who is returning to Toronto for a retrospective show of her work. Throughout the novel, she has vivid recollections of her childhood and adolescence in the city during the postwar years—particularly of her friendship with Cordelia, who persecuted her in a way that had an indelible impact on her life. The novel was a finalist... Read Cat's Eye Summary
Cereus Blooms at Night (1996) is the first novel-length work of fiction written by Shani Mootoo, a Canadian author who was born in Ireland and grew up on the island nation of Trinidad. The novel was originally published in Canada and received critical acclaim there and internationally. It was a finalist for the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize and the Giller Prize and was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize. Mootoo is also a visual artist... Read Cereus Blooms At Night Summary
Carol Matas is the author of the 1993 novel for young readers, Daniel’s Story, and she published the book in conjunction with the United States Holocaust Museum Memorial exhibit Remember the Children: Daniel’s Story. Like the museum exhibit, Daniel’s Story presents a researched account of what it was like to grow up in Nazi Germany and live through the Holocaust. Before she wrote Daniel’s Story, Matas published two historical novels about the Dutch resistance during... Read Daniel's Story Summary
Malcolm Gladwell’s 2013 book David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants is an investigation of the relationship—often distorted, in Gladwell’s view—between underdogs and giants. Taken from the Biblical account of David and Goliath, underdogs are cast as those battling (and overcoming) seemingly overwhelming odds, and giants are their adversaries. David and Goliath was a bestseller, but some critics and scholars found Gladwell’s conclusions unsatisfying and the stories he draws from unsubstantiated... Read David And Goliath Summary
An elderly widow named Lois considers the Toronto condominium she moved into after her husband’s death. She’s happy to no longer have to deal with caring for a lawn, but she’s even happier to have found a place where she can fit all of her paintings. Lois’s art collection comprises work by the “Group of Seven”—a school of 20th-century painters who depict scenes of the Canadian wilderness. Contrary to what some of her friends think... Read Death By Landscape Summary
Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference, also known as Delusions of Gender: The Real Science Behind Sex Differences, is a 2010 work of feminist nonfiction by British psychologist and philosopher Dr. Cordelia Fine. Through an intensive but accessible review of neurological and sociological studies, the book debunks the idea that men and women have different brains. Nominated for numerous awards upon its publication, it went on to become a bestseller... Read Delusions of Gender Summary
Do Not Say We Have Nothing is a novel by Madeline Thein, which focuses on the 20th century Communist Revolution in China and its effects on multiple generations of Chinese citizens. This book won the Scotiabank Giller Prize as well as the Governor General’s Award. It was also shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2016. This guide refers the American paperback edition published by W.W. Norton.Plot SummaryDuring the first horrific years of the Revolution... Read Do Not Say We Have Nothing Summary
Renowned Canadian/American author Polly Horvath published the middle-grade novel everything on a Waffle in 2001. Over two years, the book received numerous accolades, including Mr. Christie’s Book Award, the Boston Globe Horn Book Award, the ALSC Notable Children’s Book, a Newbery Honor Medal, and the Sheila A. Egoff Children’s Literature Prize. Written in the first person, 11-year-old narrator Primrose tells of her parents disappearing in a typhoon off the coast of British Columbia. Primrose discounts... Read Everything on a Waffle Summary
Fall on Your Knees (1996), first-time novelist Ann-Marie MacDonald’s ambitious multigenerational family saga set in the early decades of the 20th century, moves from the bleak coastal towns of Canada’s Cape Breton Island to the bustling New York City of the Jazz Era. Recalling both the psychological richness of William Faulkner’s family sagas set in Yoknapatawpha County and the dark passions in the Gothic tales of Flannery O’Connor, Fall on Your Knees follows three very... Read Fall on your Knees Summary
Fatty Legs: A True Story is the 2010 autobiographical account of author Margaret-Olemaun Pokiak-Fenton’s childhood experience in one of Canada’s residential schools for Indigenous children in the 19th and 20th centuries. This study guide is based on the 10th anniversary edition, in which several supplemental chapters written by Pokiak-Fenton’s daughter-in-law explain the larger context of colonialism that created the residential school system. These residential schools represented an attempt to strip Indigenous students of their cultural... Read Fatty Legs Summary
William Bell’s 1990 young adult fiction novel, Forbidden City: A Novel of Modern China, dramatizes the story of the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre. The coming-of-age story is told in diary form, narrated from the point of view of a 17-year-old Canadian high school student, Alex Jackson. During the massacre, Alex comes very close to losing everything he holds dear, as he becomes separated from his reporter father, Ted Jackson, and has to trust to the... Read Forbidden City Summary
“Friend of My Youth” is the title short story from the collection of the same name by Alice Munro, published in 1990. The collection won the 1990 Trillium Book Award, which recognizes writers from Ontario, Canada.Narrated in the first person, the story is told from the perspective of an unnamed female writer in mourning for her mother, who died some years earlier of Parkinson’s disease. The narrator describes a recurrent dream that she used to... Read Friend of My Youth Summary
First published in 1994, Funny Boy by Shyam Selvadurai won critical acclaim for its portrayal of a young man’s coming of age as a gay Sri Lankan during the civil war crisis. It won a Lambda Literary Award and the Books in Canada First Novel Award and tackles navigating sexuality, class partisanship, and emigration.Plot SummaryFunny Boy narrates the tale of young Arjie (Arjun) Chelvaratnam, a “funny” boy growing up in an upper-middle-class Sri Lankan home... Read Funny Boy Summary
Steven Erikson’s Garden of the Moon is an epic fantasy novel and the first installment in the Malazan Book of the Fallen series. Published in 1999, the novel follows a large cast of characters as they contend with the threat of an ever-expanding empire and grapple with ancient magical forces. Erikson, an anthropologist and archeologist by training, sets the novel in a fictional world peopled by human and non-human races, magic users, and a pantheon... Read Gardens of the Moon Summary
Thomas King’s novel Green Grass, Running Water (1993) is set in a contemporary First Nations Blackfoot community in Alberta, Canada. The book gained critical acclaim due to its unique structure and King’s combination of oral and written history within a compelling narrative. The novel follows several plotlines, ranging from realist to mythical, and revolves around the broad theme of Indigenous identity in the 20th century. The novel is notable for its use of humor, satire... Read Green Grass, Running Water Summary
Published in 2011, Half-Blood Blues is the second book by Esi Edugyan, a black Canadian author. The novel won the Scotiabank Giller Prize in 2012 and was also shortlisted for the 2011 Man Booker Prize and the 2012 Orange Prize for Fiction. As historical fiction, the story examines the lives of a diverse group of jazz musicians during World War II as they balance personal jealousies with the need to help each other amid mounting... Read Half-Blood Blues Summary
Half Brother (2010) is a young adult novel by Kenneth Oppel. In the novel, Oppel combines and fictionalizes several experiments in which chimpanzees learned sign language to communicate. The story follows the Tomlin family as they adopt a baby chimpanzee to see if it can learn and use language. Through this experiment and its effect on the characters, the text explores the themes of family, belonging, animal rights, communication, individuality, and growing up. The novel... Read Half Brother Summary
“Happy Endings” is a short story by Canadian writer Margaret Atwood. After the story’s trio of opening lines, the narrative is divided into five sections, labeled A-F. The story’s opening lines are: “John and Mary meet. What happens next? If you want a happy ending, try A” (43).The story then moves into Section A, in which John and Mary “fall in love and get married…have jobs they find “stimulating and challenging…buy a house…have two children…who... Read Happy Endings Summary
Heart Berries is a memoir written in connected, lyrical vignettes by Terese Marie Mailhot. It was published in 2018. The book tells the story of Mailhot’s life as a First Nations woman who moves from Canada to the American Southwest, struggles with bipolar disorder, and comes to terms with her past traumas and tumultuous, sometimes violent marriage. Plot SummaryThe beginning of the book chronicles Mailhot’s love affair with a White man named Casey, who leaves... Read Heart Berries Summary
How Does It Feel to Be A Problem: Being Young and Arab in America (2008) is a nonfiction text by Brooklyn College English professor and Arab-American Moustafa Bayoumi. The title comes from W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1903 text, The Souls of Black Folk, wherein he directed this question toward the African-American experience. Following the stories of seven young ArabAmericans living in Brooklyn, and including their struggles after the 9/11 attacks, Bayoumi’s book suggests that present-day ArabAmericans absorb the... Read How Does It Feel to Be A Problem Summary
“How I Met My Husband” is a short story by Alice Munro. It appeared in her 1974 collection Something I’ve Been Meaning To Tell You. This guide is based on the Vintage eBook edition of the collection, published in 2014.Fifteen-year-old Edie comes of age in postwar rural Canada. She is from a large, farming family. When she fails high school, she gets a job as the helper of Mrs. Peebles, the leisured wife of a... Read How I Met My Husband Summary
Published by Minotaur Books in 2013, How the Light Gets In is the ninth book in Louise Penny’s bestselling Chief Inspector Gamache mystery series. The series is famous for its heroic protagonist, Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, the head of the homicide division at the Sûreté du Québec. The novel comprises of three narratives: the murder of Constance Ouellet, the internal conflict at the Sûreté, and the mysterious death of a clerk at the Ministry of... Read How the Light Gets In Summary
How the Mind Works is a 1997 non-fiction book by Steven Pinker, who presents his ideas on how the human mind developed and how it produces the feats we take for granted every day, such as talking, walking, and making friends. Pinker is a cognitive neuroscientist who studies language acquisition in children. He approaches the study of the mind from a psychological and cognitive perspective, but he did extensive research for the book and brings... Read How The Mind Works Summary
In his 2016 psychological thriller I’m Thinking of Ending Things, Iain Reid writes about the struggles of depression, social anxiety, and loneliness. Jake, a former physics postdoctoral student and avid writer, works as a janitor in a rural high school. As he contemplates suicide, Jake fictionalizes his memories into a story with characters who represent different aspects of his identity as a way to help him make his decision. In addition to this narrative, Reid... Read I'm Thinking of Ending Things Summary
Indian Horse (2012) is a novel written by Canadian author Richard Wagamese. The story follows Saul Indian Horse, an Ojibway boy from northern Ontario who escapes his demons and rough childhood through hockey, only to succumb to alcohol after losing his joy for the game.Content Warning: The source material and this guide include instances and discussions of rape, assault, racism, and substance use disorder.Plot SummaryAs a young boy, Saul lives in the bush and has... Read Indian Horse Summary
Gabor Maté’s In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addictions is an unconventional nonfiction book on how to treat addiction, how addicts can better assimilate into society, and how society can dispel many of the myths that surround addiction. Maté works as an addiction specialist at the Portland Hotel in Vancouver, Canada. Much of the book, published in 2010, focuses on Maté’s evidence that childhood stressors increase the likelihood that one will become... Read In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts Summary
In the Skin of a Lion is the sprawling, often dreamlike story of Patrick Lewis, a Canadian man who moves from his rural hometown to Toronto in the 1920s. The novel was written by Canadian-Sri Lankan author Michael Ondaatje and published in 1987. Its loosely chronological narrative offers a patchwork of vivid, mysterious, tenuously connected stories that piece together Patrick’s journey over two decades, from the late 1910s to the late 1930s.The story and its... Read In the Skin of a Lion Summary
Invitation to the Game is a young adult science fiction novel by Canadian writer Monica Hughes. It received the Hal Clement Award in 1992. Originally published in 1990, it was rereleased under the title The Game in 2010. This study guide refers to the Simon & Schuster 2010 print edition.Plot SummaryThe novel tells the story of Lisse, a teenager in 2154. She lives in a dystopian world where robots have taken a majority of the... Read Invitation To The Game Summary
Told from the first-person point of view and in a non-linear style, Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine is about the journey and personal development of a young Indian woman as she attempts to assimilate into American culture. Influenced by Mukherjee’s experiences, the title character, Jasmine, plays a series of different roles throughout her young life.At the heart of the novel is the struggle to find one’s identity, and yet be flexible and courageous enough to reinvent a... Read Jasmine Summary
The novel Jonny Appleseed by Joshua Whitehead was originally published in 2018 by Arsenal Pulp Press. Whitehead, a queer Indigenous writer from Peguis Frist Nation, uses the auto-fictional character of Jonny to explore the intersections of LGBTQ+ and Indigenous identity. The novel was a 2021 Canada Reads Winner and the winner of a Lambda Literary Award. It was also a Globe and Mail Best Book of the Year and longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize.This... Read Jonny Appleseed Summary
Les Belles-Soeurs, or The Sisters-in-Law, was written in 1965 and premiered at the Théâtre du Rideau Vert in Montreal in 1968. Although it was Canadian playwright Michel Tremblay’s first major play, Les Belles-Soeurs revolutionized Canadian drama as the first professionally produced play written in joual, the vernacular dialect of the Québécois working class. During the 1960s, in an era known as the Quiet Revolution, joual became politicized as a symbol of the oppressed proletariat, while... Read Les Belles Soeurs Summary
Yann Martel’s Life of Pi is a Canadian philosophical novel and Booker Prize winner published in 2001. Yann Martel was born in Spain in 1963 to French-Canadian parents but spent his childhood in various countries including Costa Rica, France, Mexico, and Canada. Martel’s father was a diplomat who completed his PhD dissertation on Spanish writer Miguel de Unamuno at the University of Salamanca. Yann Martel studied philosophy at Trent University in Canada before becoming a... Read Life of Pi Summary
Little Brother, a dystopian young adult novel written by Cory Doctorow, was published by Tor Teen books in 2008. The book debuted at number nine on The New York Times Bestseller list and was a finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2009. Little Brother also won the 2009 White Pine Award, Prometheus Award, and John W. Campbell Memorial Award. The story takes place in the near future and chronicles the efforts of... Read Little Brother Summary
Lives of Girls and Women by Alice Munro was published in 1971 and is composed of eight interlinked short stories. Munro examines the everyday life of a young girl, Del Jordan, as she comes of age in a small, Canadian town during the 1940s, against the backdrop of World War II. Inspired by Munro’s childhood, the narrator explores the setting, including local wildlife and the town’s inhabitants, and focuses on themes surrounding coming of age... Read Lives of Girls and Women Summary
Lives of the Saints (1990) by Nino Ricci is the first in a trilogy of novels about an Italian immigrant to Canada, Vittorio Innocente, and his family. The author, Nino Ricci, is the son of Italian immigrants who grew up in Leamington, Ontario, home to a large community of Italian immigrants. The novel is a coming-of-age story told in first-person narration that details Vittorio’s life growing up in an impoverished small town in Italy, and... Read Lives of the Saints Summary
Lost in the Barrens is a 1956 middle grade novel based loosely on the lived experiences of author Farley Mowat. Mowat’s experiences in the remote wilderness of northern Canada inspired an adult version of the saga, People of the Deer (1952), and the children’s adaptation. He is known for blending survival narratives with intricate details about the Canadian northern wilderness. Mowat is best known for Never Cry Wolf (1963), which Disney adapted for film in... Read Lost In The Barrens Summary
The novel predominantly takes place in the slums of Montreal, Canada. Baby, the thirteen-year-old protagonist of the novel, lives with her heroin-addicted father, Jules. Her mother died when she was still a baby, leaving fifteen-year-old Jules to care for her on his own. His young age, addiction, and overall immaturity leads to an unstable and dangerous life for Baby. The novel is told from Baby’s adult point of view, and each section and subsequent chapters... Read Lullabies for Little Criminals Summary
Margaret Atwood’s novel MaddAddam, published in 2013, completes her post-apocalyptic MaddAddam trilogy that begins with Oryx and Crake (2003) and continues with The Year of the Flood (2009). The trilogy takes place in the aftermath of a destroyed technological dystopia, a world in which corporations have totalitarian control. Atwood, an award-winning Canadian author, has been a prolific writer of poetry, short stories, novels, and many other forms since the early 1960s. She is known for... Read MaddAddam Summary
Medicine River, originally published in 1989, is a novel by Thomas King, one of the most prolific Indigenous American writers of the 20th century. The title of the novel takes its name from the town in Alberta, Canada, where the characters live, near a Blackfoot reservation. Their stories, as told by protagonist Will, delve into themes such as Friendship and Forbearance within the frame of Life in an Alberta Blackfoot Community. As Will tells these... Read Medicine River Summary
Richard Wagamese’s Medicine Walk (2014) follows 16-year-old Franklin Starlight on his journey to find the perfect burial site for his terminally ill father, Eldon Starlight, a member of the Ojibway tribe of Indigenous peoples. Frank carries Eldon on horseback into the wilderness where Eldon wishes to die in the traditional manner of Ojibway warriors—facing East so that he can see the last sunrise of his last day on earth.Eldon abandoned Franklin, who goes by Frank... Read Medicine Walk Summary
David Richards’s gritty, allegorical novel, Mercy Among the Children, won the 2000 Giller Prize for Canadian literature. The novel, set in rural New Brunswick in the latter half of the 20th century, chronicles three generations of the Henderson family and their sufferings. The tale is told by the scruffy, young Lyle Henderson, who has faltered from the humble roots of his saint-like family. Richards explores biblical themes through the small-town lives of the impoverished family.Plot... Read Mercy Among the Children Summary
Mexican Gothic is a feminist Gothic novel by Mexican writer Silvia Moreno-Garcia, who currently resides in Canada. Set in 1950s Mexico City and the burned-out mining town of El Triunfo, the novel is a horror-tinged thriller in which Noemí Taboada, a socialite with aspirations to become an anthropologist, goes to El Triunfo to rescue her cousin Catalina from the Doyles. The Doyles are an impoverished family of English silver barons who have united with a... Read Mexican Gothic Summary
Canadian author Eden Robinson’s novel Monkey Beach (2000) is set in the village of Kitamaat in British Columbia, Canada. Kitamaat is the primary community of the Haisla nation, one of the Indigenous Canadian groups known as the First Nations. Monkey Beach tells the story of teenager Lisa Hill, whose brother Jimmy has mysteriously disappeared. In the aftermath of his disappearance, Lisa reflects on memories of her youth. The novel combines elements of mystery and the... Read Monkey Beach Summary
My Year of Meats is a contemporary novel of literary fiction which focuses on the American meat industry, global capitalism, sex and gender, and artmaking. Written by Booker Prize-nominee Ruth L. Ozeki and published in 1998, the novel won the 1998 Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize. This guide refers to the 1999 Penguin paperback edition of the text. Plot Summary Jane Takagi-Little, a Japanese American documentarian living in New York City in 1991, gets a phone call... Read My Year of Meats Summary
William Gibson’s Neuromancer, published in 1984, was his breakthrough novel and one of the founding books of the cyberpunk genre of science fiction. It became the first paperback-only release to win the genre’s trinity of prizes: the Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick awards. Gibson’s lyrical prose played an important role in that recognition, while his gritty vision of a future that coupled improved technology with minimal social progress gave it immediate relevance for readers... Read Neuromancer Summary
Farley Mowat published Never Cry Wolf in 1963. The book is a non-fiction memoir of the 18 months he spent in the Barrens, a treeless area of tundra, studying arctic wolves for the Dominion Wildlife Service. Told that these wolves killed caribou for sport, Farley was surprised to discover that wolves never attacked humans and only culled the deer herds of unhealthy animals. Farley also encountered rampant inefficiency among his government colleagues, which he reports... Read Never Cry Wolf Summary
No Great Mischief is a 1999 bildungsroman by Canadian novelist Alistair MacLeod. The story begins with Alexander MacDonald, a successful Canadian orthodontist, driving to Toronto to visit his brother, Calum. He searches for his brother’s apartment through the city’s seedier districts and eventually finds the right place. Calum is an alcoholic, one of many people left behind by the modern world. They speak together in English and Gaelic, reminiscing about their family. As Calum becomes... Read No Great Mischief Summary
No Impact Man: The Adventures of a Guilty Liberal Who Attempts to Save the Planet, and the Discoveries He Makes About Himself and Our Way of Life in the Process is an autobiography published in 2009. Author Colin Beavan, tired of being a liberal who only lectures his wife about not wearing fur, decides to dedicate himself, his wife Michelle, and their toddler Isabella to a year of creating no impact on the environment. His... Read No Impact Man Summary
First published in 2000, No Logo is Naomi Klein’s classic examination of globalization and its discontents at the close of the 20th century. What started as a journalistic “hunch” about growing anticorporate sentiment on university campuses evolved into a full-scale exposé of the subterranean social and economic system lurking behind our logo-driven consumption. The stated hypothesis of the book is that “as more people discover the brand-name secrets of the global logo web, their outrage... Read No Logo Summary
No More Dead Dogs by Gordon Korman (Hyperion Books, 2002) is a humorous middle-grade fiction book about how one boy’s unwillingness to lie changes his life and the lives of everyone at his school. No More Dead Dogs won the 2002 Young Reader’s Choice Award (intermediate), one of many award-winners penned by Korman. Gordon Korman published his first book (This Can’t be Happening at Macdonald Hall, first in the Macdonald Hall series) when he was... Read No More Dead Dogs Summary
Oryx and Crake is a dystopian science-fiction novel that deals with extreme genetic engineering. The plot does not unfold in a linear fashion, nor are the facts established from the outset. Rather, the novel moves back and forward in time, often on a chapter-by-chapter basis, and the reader gradually pieces together what has happened.The novel begins by establishing its central character, “Snowman,” who we find sitting near the sea. He is dishevelled and gaunt, and... Read Oryx and Crake Summary
Parvana’s Journey by Deborah Ellis follows 13-year-old Parvana as she makes her way across war-torn Afghanistan in search of her mother and siblings. Published in 2002, this novel is a sequel to the international bestseller The Breadwinner, which was adapted as a 2017 animated film, and is the second in a series of four called The Breadwinner series. Although Parvana’s Journey is a work of fiction, Ellis bases the setting of the novel on the... Read Parvana's Journey Summary
Peter Nimble and His Fantastic Eyes is a middle grade novel by Jonathan Auxier originally published in 2011. The novel encompasses a variety of genres: fantasy, the heroic quest, and even some Dickensian orphan flourishes, for good measure. It was a BookPage Magazine Best Book of the year, an ABA New Voices selection (2011), and a finalist for the Monica Hughes Award for science fiction and fantasy.This study guide references the edition published by Amulet... Read Peter Nimble and His Fantastic Eyes Summary
In Plagues and Peoples, William H. McNeill argues that patterns of disease have integrally influenced human history from prehistory to the modern day. Until 1976, the year of this book’s publication, the historical study of disease was treated as a footnote of minor importance compared to war, agriculture, and politics. By contrast, McNeill takes a broader view and breaks human history into two categories. The forces of ecology and humanity are equally weighed in McNeill’s... Read Plagues and Peoples Summary
Prisoner of Tehran is a memoir by Marina Nemat that recounts her harrowing experiences in an Iranian prison post-1979 revolution, highlighting The Impact of Political and Ideological Repression. Through her narrative, Nemat explores The Challenges Faced by Women Under Authoritarian Regimes, illustrating the severe constraints and injustices they endured. Despite these adversities, her story is a testament to The Resilience of the Human Spirit, which showcases her journey of survival and defiance against oppressive forces.This... Read Prisoner of Tehran Summary
Modris Eksteins’s 1989 nonfiction book, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, takes its title from a scandalous 1913 Russian ballet. Critics believed that the ballet’s complex, atonal score, stomping choreography, and the feature of a virginal sacrifice mocked classical ballet conventions. Eksteins—a Canadian historian and author—argues that the juxtaposition of violence and creativity in the ballet echoed in both World War I—“The Great War”—and its aftermath.Eksteins focuses on... Read Rites of Spring Summary
The Road to Chlifa is a 1992 novel by Michèle Marineau, originally published in French. The short novel unfolds in three sections, telling the story of protagonist Karim Nakad’s journey from Beirut to Chlifa, Lebanon,and, finally, to Montreal. The novel is set during the height of the Lebanese Civil War. Through this progression, it confronts issues of violence and warfare, immigration and racism, and the power of storytelling.Section One, narrated from the perspective of an... Read Road to Chlifa Summary
IntroductionEmma Donoghue’s Room is a 2010 novel about a boy named Jack who lives in a single room with his mother, Ma. Room is a crime thriller novel that explores themes of trauma, innocence, and adaptability through the eyes of five-year-old narrator, Jack. Room has received many awards, including the ALA Alex Award, the Indies Choice Book Award for Fiction, and The New York Times Book Review Best Book of the Year award. Room was... Read Room Summary
Originally published in 1977, Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes is a middle-grade historical fiction novel written by Eleanor Coerr based on the true story of Sadako Sasaki, a young girl living in Hiroshima, Japan, when the atomic bomb was dropped in 1945. At age 12, Sadako is diagnosed with leukemia, often called “the atom bomb disease.” Inspired by a Japanese legend, Sadako sets out to fold 1,000 origami cranes, hoping she will be granted... Read Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes Summary
Sadie is a young adult mystery novel published in 2018 by the Canadian author Courtney Summers. The book chronicles teenager Sadie Hunter’s quest to find the man who killed her sister. In alternating chapters, Sadie’s subsequent disappearance becomes the topic of West McCray’s podcast The Girls. Sadie won the 2018 Edgar Award and was chosen for many Best of 2018 book lists.Plot SummarySadie follows the journey of 19-year-old protagonist Sadie Hunter as she searches for... Read Sadie Summary
First published in 1998, Guy Gavriel Kay’s Sailing to Sarantium is the first book in The Sarantine Mosaic duology. The setting of the novel, based on the Mediterranean world in the sixth century, alludes to the future conflict between the Eastern Roman Empire and the Ostrogothic kingdom of Italy that had replaced the Western Roman Empire. Kay’s work incorporates magical realism, political intrigue, religious themes, existential crises, and detailed, historically accurate descriptions of art and... Read Sailing to Sarantium Summary
Gordon Korman’s middle-grade novel, Schooled, was published in 2007. The narrative is told from multiple perspectives, with the title of the chapter indicating the perspective from which it is told. Schooled starts out with 13-year-old Capricorn Anderson getting arrested for driving his grandmother, Rain, to the hospital after she falls out of a tree, breaking her hip. Capricorn and Rain live alone on Garland Farm, a former commune that seems perpetually trapped in 1967. Homeschooled... Read Schooled Summary
Lt. General Roméo Dallaire is a Canadian officer who was assigned as the force commander in the United Nations Assistance Mission to Rwanda (UNAMIR), a UN peacekeeping mission to facilitate negotiations after the Rwandan Civil War. He wrote about his experiences witnessing the breakdown of the peace process and the Rwandan Genocide in Shake Hands With The Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda. Published in 2003, the book won the 2004 Governor General’s Award... Read Shake Hands with the Devil Summary
Shoeless Joe (1982) by W.P. Kinsellais a magic realist novel that brings together stories about the Black Sox Scandal of the 1919 World Series by intermingling fantastic elements with the factual. The novel tells the story of Ray Kinsella, who lives with his wife Annie and five-year-old daughter, Karin, on a farm in Iowa, where he grows corn. The writer weaves the narrative around the importance of baseball in the collective memory of Americans, and... Read Shoeless Joe Summary
Kenneth Oppel’s 1997 award-winning middle-grade novel Silverwing is a high-fantasy work that follows a young bat’s journey to find his colony. The novel has sold over a million copies and been adapted for television as an animated children’s series. This book is the first of four in The Silverwing Book Series.Plot SummaryThe novel is divided into three parts, and it shifts point of view between Shade, a runt newborn Silverwing bat, and Goth, a cannibalistic... Read Silverwing Summary
Madeleine Thien is a Canadian writer whose work explores the trans-cultural world of Asian art, politics, and family life within Canada’s diasporic Asian Communities. She was born in 1974 to a Malaysian Chinese father and a Hong Kong Chinese mother. Thien studied contemporary dance but switched to creative writing as an undergraduate in college. She earned her MFA in writing from the University of British Columbia.Thien’s collection of short stories, Simple Recipes (2001, Little Brown... Read Simple Recipes Summary
Lawrence Hill’s novel Someone Knows My Name was first published in Canada in 2007 under the title The Book of Negroes. This work of historical fiction was published with its new title in the United States in 2008. The novel won the 2007 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the 2008 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize.Inspired by the historical document the “Book of Negroes,” a record of escaped African slaves who found freedom in Canada, Hill set... Read Someone Knows My Name Summary
Son of the Mob is a young adult novel by Gordon Korman, published in 2002. It is a comedic adventure story that concerns a teenaged boy named Vince Luca, and his attempts to come to terms with his Mafia family.Vince’s life is a mixture of mundane teenaged concerns (girls, grades) and adult criminal activity. This is established in the first chapter of the book, when he takes a girl named Angela out on a date... Read Son Of The Mob Summary
Published in 2014, Station Eleven is the fourth novel by Emily St. John Mandel. The book won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2015, as well as the Toronto Book Award, and was shortlisted or nominated for several others. Set in a post-apocalyptic future where a flu outbreak decimates the world’s population, the book is sometimes categorized as science fiction, although it does not feature any fictional technology; its protagonists’ dramatic involvement also qualifies it... Read Station Eleven Summary
Published in 2005, Still Life is Louise Penny’s debut novel, the first in a series of mystery novels set in rural Canada featuring detective Armand Gamache. Penny won multiple awards for Still Life, including a Crime Writers’ Association Dagger Award, a Barry Award, an Arthur Ellis Award, an Anthony Award, and the Dilys Award. A made-for-TV film adaptation produced by PDM Entertainment aired in 2013. This guide is based on the 2006 Minotaur Books edition.Content... Read Still Life Summary
Stone Mattress: Nine Wicked Tales is a 2014 collection of nine short stories from Canadian author Margaret Atwood. While Atwood has published fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, she is probably best known for her dystopian novel, The Handmaid’s Tale. Atwood often tackles the power of the written word in her work. Many of the characters in Stone Mattress: Nine Wicked Tales are writers. Atwood revisits other of her familiar themes in these stories, including gender, aging... Read Stone Mattress Summary
Jonathon Auxier’s Sweep: The Story of a Girl and Her Monster (2018) is a work of fiction written for middle grade readers. It tells the story of the brave Nan Sparrow, a young chimney sweep who is given the gift of a golem—a protective monster—by her father figure, the Sweep. Nan navigates cruelty and poverty in her journey to achieve a fairer life for herself and her friends, forming a loving pseudo-family along the way... Read Sweep: The Story of a Girl and Her Monster Summary
Swindle is a middle-grade novel published in 2008 by Canadian American author Gordon Korman. In the story, 6th-grader Griffin Bing enlists a group of his classmates to retrieve a rare Babe Ruth baseball card from an unscrupulous collector known as Swindle, who has conned Griffin out of the card. The book is the first of eight books, as of 2019, in the popular Swindle series. Nickelodeon made a film of the same name based on the novel in... Read Swindle Summary
The Adventures of Augie March is a 1953 novel by Saul Bellow. In the novel, Bellow’s third, the eponymous title character chronicles his eventful life from an underprivileged childhood in Chicago to his waning wanderlust in Paris. The novel is critically acclaimed and won the 1954 National Book Award for Fiction. Bellow was a lauded author in his lifetime, winning prestigious awards like the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution... Read The Adventures of Augie March Summary
The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, by Mordecai Richler, originally published in 1959, follows the exploits of a working-class Jewish boy growing up in a turbulent neighborhood and family in Montreal, Canada. Told in four parts, the novel chronicles Duddy’s relentless pursuit of higher social status and monetary success. Duddy travels on both sides of the law in his business dealings, keeping company with moguls and outlaws alike. He ends up working in industries that he... Read The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz Summary
The Back of the Turtle (2014) is a bestselling novel by Canadian American author Thomas King. King is of Cherokee Greek descent and has garnered acclaim for his novels about Indigenous Canadian experiences, including The Inconvenient Indian and Green Grass Running Water. The Back of the Turtle won King the Governor General’s literary award.The narrative follows Gabriel Quinn, a member of the First Nations community of Lethbridge, Alberta, as he returns to his family’s home... Read The Back of the Turtle Summary
“The Bear Came Over the Mountain” is one of Alice Munro’s most popular works and tackles themes of infidelity, love, and hypocrisy. The short story was first published in The New Yorker in December 1999 and was later included in Munro’s Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage short story collection in 2001, her 10th collection. “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” received a movie adaptation titled Away from Her in 2006. Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage... Read The Bear Came over the Mountain Summary
The Beautiful Mystery, published in 2012, is the eighth book in former Canadian journalist Louise Penny’s Chief Inspector Gamache series. The Gamache series is known for its recurring cast of characters, psychological depth, and long-term story arcs. Gamache is a longtime member of Québec’s provincial police force, most often known by its French name, the Sûreté du Québec. Gamache’s struggles with police corruption form the main plot of several books, including A Fatal Grace and... Read The Beautiful Mystery Summary
The Birth House is a work of historical fiction written by Canadian novelist Ami McKay and published in 2009. The book was nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and won three Libris Awards from the Canadian Booksellers Association. The story takes place in the early 20th century during World War I and is set primarily in Scots Bay, a small shipbuilding community in Nova Scotia, Canada. While she is originally from Indiana, McKay... Read The Birth House Summary
In the nonfiction book The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker, a Harvard-educated experimental psychologist, draws from cutting-edge cognitive science to debunk popular ideas about the mind and human nature. Primarily, Pinker argues against the concept of the Blank Slate—that is, that the mind is a “blank slate”—showing instead that our brains come hardwired with universal attributes. He also discredits two related concepts, that of the Noble Savage (the idea that primitive humans were superior to and... Read The Blank Slate Summary
Aminata Diallo, from the village of Bayo, in western Africa, is the daughter of Mamadu, a jeweler, and Sira, a midwife. At the age of eleven, she is kidnapped after watching her parents murdered and her village burned. She is captured by African slave traders, who sell her to white slave traders. She and the other captives are marched in a coffle, a line of prisoners chained together, on a harrowing three-month journey to the... Read The Book of Negroes Summary
The Breadwinner, also known as Parvana, is a 2000 children’s novel by Canadian author and activist Deborah Ellis. It centers on an 11-year-old girl named Parvana who, due to her family’s circumstances, is forced to defy the Taliban and their repressive laws to become the breadwinner for her family. Exploring themes of human connection, maturation and bravery, and the repression of women, The Breadwinner was critically acclaimed upon its release and has had over 40... Read The Breadwinner Summary
The Cellist of Sarajevo focuses on the struggles of four people during the long and brutal Siege of Sarajevo. For the citizens of Sarajevo at this time, life is torturous. There are snipers in the hills encircling the city with their guns trained on the people below. These snipers, who the characters refer to as “the men in the hills,” are picking off the townspeople one by one whenever they venture outside for food or... Read The Cellist of Sarajevo Summary
The Cider House Rules is the sixth novel by the American Canadian author John Irving. It was published in 1985 by William Morrow and Company. The novel was made into a movie directed by Lasse Hallstrom in 1999. This guide uses the 2012 William Morrow Kindle Edition of The Cider House Rules.Plot SummaryThe Cider House Rules is a Bildungsroman, or a coming-of-age novel; it is set in the 1930s through to the 1950s. Its protagonist... Read The Cider House Rules Summary
Michael Ondaatje is the author of the poem “The Cinnamon Peeler.” First published in his fictionalized memoir, Running in the Family (1982), Ondaatje republished the poem in his poetry collection Secular Love (1984), and the poem is one of many that comprises the final section, titled “Skin Boat.” Ondaatje is a Canadian citizen who lived in England and was born in Ceylon, now known as Sri Lanka—a former English colony famous for its cinnamon (Ceylon... Read The Cinnamon Peeler Summary
Published in 2004, The Corporation, by legal scholar Joel Bakan, demonstrates that corporations often misbehave because it is in their nature to do so. The corporate legal mandate, to pursue profit on behalf of shareholders, impels corporations to take any action, including callous, antisocial, and even unlawful behaviors, so long as they generate a profit. Because corporations are created by governments, they are beholden to the state for their survival, yet they often manage to... Read The Corporation Summary
The Couple Next Door, Shari Lapena’s 2016 international best-seller, begins as a classic detective story. As the mystery deepens, the novel turns into a tense psychological study of a dysfunctional family, the calculating logic of emotional manipulation, the spiral of post-partum depression, and the corrupting power of greed. Paramount Television optioned the novel for a TV series adaptation in 2018. Shari Lapena is the author of eight novels for adults, including The Couple Next Door... Read The Couple Next Door Summary
The Cruelest Month by Louise Penny is the third book in her Chief Inspector Gamache series. Published by St. Martin’s Press, the novel earned the Agatha Award for Best Novel of 2008. Formerly a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) journalist and radio host, Penny published her debut novel, Still Life, in 2005. The first book in the Gamache series, Still Life received numerous awards and propelled Penny into the top echelon of modern mystery writers. The... Read The Cruelest Month Summary
Published in 1969, The Edible Woman was Margret Atwood’s first novel and established her reputation as a significant contemporary novelist. The Edible Woman follows recently engaged Marian McAlpin as she attempts to reconcile her need for personal autonomy with the gendered expectations inherent within the roles of a wife and mother. As Marian begins to feel a loss of identity, her body suddenly refuses certain foods, particularly meat. To reflect the inner struggle her protagonist... Read The Edible Woman Summary
The English Patient (1992) is a historical romance novel by Canadian writer Michael Ondaatje. The novel explores the relationships between four dissimilar people living in an abandoned Italian monastery at the end of World War II. The eponymous English patient—actually a Hungarian count burned beyond recognition—tells Canadian nurse Hana the story of his forbidden romance with British amateur cartographer Katharine Clifton as their small team attempted, several years earlier, to map North African deserts. Using... Read The English Patient Summary
First published in 1985, Margaret Atwood’s sixth novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, has received numerous accolades and prizes and remains widely critically celebrated. Set in what used to be the United States but is now a repressive theocracy called the Republic of Gilead, it is narrated by the protagonist, Offred, who recounts her daily experiences intercut with memories of her life before the revolution and during her training to become a “Handmaid.”Content Warning: The source material... Read The Handmaid's Tale Summary
Margaret Atwood’s The Heart Goes Last is a work of speculative fiction released in 2015. The novel is a reworking of her Positron series for the website Byliner: four interconnected stories that were digitally released as episodes over the course of a year, starting in March 2012. The project aimed to recapture the literary tradition of serialization, but the final installment was never released, and the novel is intended to bring things together and provide... Read The Heart Goes Last Summary
Canadian author Lawrence Hill published The Illegal in 2015. This fast-paced fictional political thriller, which focuses on a young undocumented marathon runner, uses multiple perspectives and irony to question what it really means to be a citizen. Hill is a noted contributor to the fiction and nonfiction genres, particularly for his work on race. The Illegal furthers this work through the thriller and satire genres. An award-winning author, Hill has received the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize... Read The Illegal Summary
The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America is a 2012 nonfiction book by Thomas King about the history of Indian-White relations. King is a novelist of Cherokee descent, and The Inconvenient Indian is his first book of nonfiction. The book was awarded the CBA Libris Award for Best Non-Fiction Book in 2013. This guide follows the first edition of the book.In the Prologue, “Warm Toast and Porcupines,” King explains how... Read The Inconvenient Indian Summary
The Incredible Journey was written by Sheila Burnford and published in 1960. It is a children’s title—although Burnford has asserted that it was not meant for children exclusively. The novel began to enjoy cultural prominence when it was adapted into a Disney film in 1963. It was also re-made in a 1993 film. Plot SummaryIt is the beginning of an Indian summer in northwest Ontario at the outset of the story. The writer John Longridge... Read The Incredible Journey Summary
The Juvie Three (2008) is a young adult novel by Gordon Korman. It is a unique coming-of-age story about personal transformation and found family, and a commentary on the stigmas that often burden those held back by their pasts. Korman challenges these societal perceptions and shows that we all have the power to change. This study guide references the 2008 paperback edition from Hyperion Books.Plot SummaryGraham Fosse, known as “Gecko,” drives a stolen getaway car... Read The Juvie Three Summary
Kathleen Grissom’s 2010 novel, The Kitchen House, is a work of historical fiction that centers on the happenings at Captain James Pyke’s southern Virginia tobacco plantation, Tall Oaks, beginning in 1791. The two narrative threads follow Lavinia, a seven-year-old Irish orphan working at Tall Oaks as an indentured servant, and Belle, the beautiful young daughter of James and his slave. The novel is told from the first-person perspectives of Belle and Lavinia alternately over 55... Read The Kitchen House Summary
The Long Way Home (2014) is the 10th novel in the Inspector Gamache series written by the Canadian author Louise Penny. Like the other books in the series, the novel revolves around the village of Three Pines, Quebec, although it also encompasses events in other places. In addition to a central mystery focused on a wife’s attempt to find her estranged husband, the novel explores themes of art, creativity, ambition, and loss. This guide references... Read The Long Way Home Summary
The Luminaries (2013) by Eleanor Catton is historical fiction written in the style of a 19th-century serial novel. It is set during the gold rush on the South Island of New Zealand in the 1860s. A whodunit told using two overlapping timelines and extensive flashbacks, it deploys motifs of astrology to paint a detailed portrait of class, gender, and conflict on the colonial frontier. The novel won the Man Booker Prize in 2013; at the... Read The Luminaries Summary
“The Management of Grief” is a short story by Bharati Mukherjee. It was published in 1988 as a part of her collection entitled The Middleman and Other Stories. It also appeared in The Best American Short Stories of 1989 and in The Best American Short Stories of the Eighties.“The Management of Grief” is narrated from the perspective of Shaila Bhave, a middle-aged Indian widow and an immigrant to Canada. She has recently lost her husband... Read The Management of Grief Summary
The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline is a science fiction novel set in a post-apocalyptic Canada where climate devastation ravages the world and the Canadian government’s Recruiters hunt Natives for the dreams that are woven into their bone marrow. Millions have died in the wake of global warming, and those who remain have experienced such extensive trauma that they have lost the ability to dream. Dimaline describes a world plagued by natural disasters, with vivid descriptions... Read The Marrow Thieves Summary
“The Moral Bucket List” is an essay by David Brooks first published in the New York Times Op-Ed Section on April 11, 2015. Born in Toronto and raised in New York, Brooks is a prominent cultural journalist, political analyst, and book author. Since 2003, he has written a twice-weekly column for the New York Times, and since 2004, he has been a political analyst for PBS NewsHour. “The Moral Bucket List” is an adapted excerpt... Read The Moral Bucket List Summary
Barbara Haworth-Attard’s young adult novel Theories of Relativity follows the story of Dylan Wallace, a 16-year-old boy living on the streets of a large city in Canada. Through first-person, present-tense narration, Dylan navigates the dangers and risks of street life and deals with the hardships that accompany the lifestyle. This novel was originally published in Canada in 2003 by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. This study guide follows the First American Edition of the novel, published in... Read Theories of Relativity Summary
Mary Lawson’s 2016 novel, The Other Side of the Bridge, tells the dual stories of Arthur and Ian, two men separated by a generation but in love with the same woman: Arthur’s wife, Laura.Odd-numbered chapters are told from the point-of-view of Ian Christopherson, the son of a doctor who takes a job on Arthur Dunn’s farm, chiefly to be near Laura Dunn. Even-numbered chapters follow Arthur Dunn. The older of the two Dunn brothers, Arthur... Read The Other Side of the Bridge Summary
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“The Painted Door” is a short story by Sinclair Ross. It was first published in 1938 and later reprinted in The Lamp at Noon and Other Stories by Sinclair Ross in 1988. Ross is known for his fiction (both short stories and novels) depicting life on the Canadian prairies, particularly during the Great Depression. The author was born in 1908 on a homestead near Shellbrook, Saskatchewan, Canada, and lived in various locations across the Canadian... Read The Painted Door Summary
The Penelopiad is a 2005 novella by Margaret Atwood. It is told from the point of view of Penelope, Odysseus’ wife, and her twelve hanged maids. It offers an alternate perspective on the events famously portrayed by Homer in The Odyssey, giving depth to a previously shallow portrait of a faithful wife and her “deceitful” maids. Borrowing from Greek tragedy, Atwood switches narrators between Penelope, now dead and in the underworld, and the hanged maids, who speak... Read The Penelopiad Summary
The Peripheral is a 2014 science-fiction novel by William Gibson. Gibson has been writing science fiction works since the 1970s and is considered one of the founding fathers of the cyberpunk genre. His debut novel, Neuromancer, is one of the genre’s foundational texts and is the only novel to win the Nebula, Hugo, and Philip K. Dick awards. Since then, Gibson has written several bestselling science-fiction trilogies. The Peripheral is the first novel of The... Read The Peripheral Summary
In The Return of Martin Guerre, Natalie Zemon Davis, historian and professor at Princeton University, reconstructs the sixteenth century legend of Martin Guerre, a man with a wooden leg who arrived to a courthouse in Toulouse just in time to denounce an imposter who had stolen his wife, his family, and his inheritance. Arnaud du Tilh, a clever and persuasive peasant with a somewhat sordid past, had indeed taken Martin’s identity, and he nearly escaped... Read The Return of Martin Guerre Summary
The Rez Sisters by Tomson Highway is a two-act play that was first performed in 1986 at the Native Canadian Centre of Toronto. After being translated into French by Jocelyne Beaulieu, “Les Reines de la réserve” premiered by Théâtre Populaire du Québec in 1993. A version of the play in the Cree language was performed in 2010, and Canadian performances with Indigenous actors have been staged in the 2020s. Highway’s play re-envisions the 1965 play... Read The Rez Sisters Summary
The Robber Bride by Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood was originally published in the United States in 1993. It tells the story of three women who suffer betrayal at the hands of a fourth woman, Zenia. The novel was inspired by The Robber Bridegroom, a 19th century German fairy tale which Atwood updates to 1990s Toronto. It combines Atwood’s notable sense of humor with her attention to contemporary political issues such as feminism and environmentalism. The... Read The Robber Bride Summary
The Shack is a novel by Canadian author William P. Young and his first published work. Young is the son of Christian missionaries who worked in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, and he grew up alternately amid the Dani ethnic group and in missionary boarding schools before the family moved back to Canada. Having settled in the United States as an adult, Young began writing stories for his children and friends. The earliest version... Read The Shack Summary
The Silent Wife by A. S. A. Harrison is a psychological thriller about a failing marriage. Published in 2013, the novel is Harrison’s first entry into the genre, though she had previously published an erotic novel and a non-fiction book on the female orgasm in the 1970s. Harrison passed away from cancer weeks before the novel’s publication. The novel has been compared to Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl in terms of both its content—the depiction of... Read The Silent Wife Summary
The Sisters Brothers is a 2011 novel by Canadian writer Patrick DeWitt. Set in 1851, it traces the journey of Charlie and Eli Sisters, two hired killers traveling from Oregon to San Francisco to find a man called Warm, who allegedly stole something from their boss, the Commodore. The darkly comic Western is in the picaresque genre, as the brothers’ episodic misadventures explore different communities populating the American West.The Sisters Brothers is divided into 64... Read The Sisters Brothers Summary
Written in 1993, The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields is the fictional autobiography of Daisy Goodwill Flett, whose life story plays out in North America and spans much of the 20th century. The novel claims to be Daisy’s retelling of her life story, but it includes other characters’ voices and points of view, thus satirizing fiction and storytelling itself. By including a family tree and “real” family photographs, the novel explores the difference between reality... Read The Stone Diaries Summary
The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (2009) by Alan Bradley is a murder mystery novel. It is the author’s first book, published when he was 70 years old. The novel won the Dagger, Agatha, Barry, Dilys, Arthur Ellis, Macavity, and Spotted Owl Awards for Best First or Best Debut Novel. It is the first book of The Flavia de Luce Novels.Plot SummaryThe protagonist and narrator of The Sweetness at the Bottom of the... Read The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie Summary
The Testaments is Margaret Atwood’s 2019 sequel to her dystopian novel, The Handmaid’s Tale. The Testaments chronicles resistance efforts against the ultra-religious authoritarian nation, Gilead, through the perspectives of two teenage half-sisters and the leader of Gilead’s women’s sphere.The Testaments begins 15 years after the conclusion of The Handmaid’s Tale, in which the Handmaid Offred escaped Gilead with her baby, Nicole. Gileadean society continues under the oppressive thumb of the ultra-religious Commanders and Aunts. In... Read The Testaments Summary
The Tiger Flu by Larissa Lai is a work of dystopian speculative fiction first published in 2018 by Arsenal Pulp Press, an independent publisher based in Vancouver, Canada. With its focus on futuristic technologies that merge and manipulate human biology, The Tiger Flu can be subclassified as a cyber/biopunk thriller. The book won the 2019 Lambda Literary Award, which recognizes and celebrates the best LGBTQ books of the year. A Chinese Canadian, lesbian writer, Larissa... Read The Tiger Flu Summary
The Troop (2014) is a horror novel by Nick Cutter. Troop 52, consisting of five teenage boy scouts and their Scoutmaster, Dr. Tim Riggs, goes on an annual camping trip to a remote, uninhabited island in the province of Prince Edward Island, Canada. There, a strange, sick man approaches their cabin and introduces them to a deadly, bioengineered virus. Just as dangerous as the virus itself are the crumbling group dynamics and morality once the... Read The Troop Summary
Published in 2013, The Unlikely Hero of Room 13B by Teresa Toten is a young adult fiction novel that closely examines obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and mental health issues in teens and high schoolers. Filled with moments of deep emotion, harsh realities, and unexpected humor, The Unlikely Hero of Room 13B is about how we all navigate the chaos and stress of our world. Toten won the Governor General Literary Award in Canada for this novel... Read The Unlikely Hero of Room 13B Summary
The Wars by Timothy Findley is a 1977 novel about Robert Ross, a young Canadian officer who enlists in the military and fights in the First World War. The novel uses first, second, and third person narrative points of view. By switching between the different perspectives, the novel gives the reader the sense that they are a historian searching through archives, looking at photographs, and interviewing people from Robert’s life. The book is an example... Read The Wars Summary
This study guide refers to the 2009 House of Anansi Press edition of Wade Davis’s The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World. The Wayfinders collects a series of five Massey Lectures that Davis delivered in Canada in 2009. Davis is a Colombian-Canadian anthropologist and ethnobotanist, and the Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society. This position, as well as his long anthropological career, has allowed Davis to spend time with many of the... Read The Wayfinders Summary
The World According to Garp, John Irving’s fourth novel, was first published in 1978 and continues to enjoy a wide circulation. The novel features elements drawn from Irving’s life and is a literary satire of gender dynamics in the wake of second-wave feminism. Irving himself claims that it’s a protest novel. The main subject areas include parenthood, death, feminism, manhood and masculinity, marriage and family structures, the influence of literature in a reader’s life, and... Read The World According To Garp Summary
The Year of the Flood (2009) is a speculative fiction novel by Margaret Atwood, an award-winning novelist, poet, literary critic, and environmental activist from Canada. Published after Oryx and Crake (2003), The Year of the Flood is the second book of the MaddAddam trilogy, followed by MaddAddam (2013). Exploring themes like human influence on the environment and the physical abuse and sexual objectification of women, The Year of the Flood brought Atwood great acclaim, particularly... Read The Year of the Flood Summary
In This Changes Everything (2014), Naomi Klein explores the issue of climate change from a political perspective and considers why we have failed as yet to respond to the global danger it poses.Klein bases her argument on the scientific consensus that at projected rates of carbon emission we are heading towards an environmental catastrophe that would irreparably damage the natural world, destroy lives, and destabilise human society. She asks the question: considering the stakes are... Read This Changes Everything Summary
This One Summer is a Canadian young adult graphic novel written by Mariko Tamaki and illustrated by her cousin, Jillian Tamaki. Mariko Tamaki has written several graphic novels, and has worked for both Marvel and DC Comics. This One Summer was originally published in 2014 by Groundwood Books, and follows the summer experiences of two young girls approaching adolescence and watching their parents cope with the various pressures of adulthood. The novel has been the... Read This One Summer Summary
Ungifted is a 2012 novel for children written by Gordon Korman and is the recipient of the 2014 Red Cedar Award. Narrated from multiple perspectives, the story follows Donovan Curtis, an average student at Hardcastle Middle School who is accidentally sent to an academy for gifted kids. It chronicles the characters’ growth and change as they learn to balance intellectual achievement with experience and social engagement.Donovan is a prankster who struggles to control his impulses... Read Ungifted Summary
Jacques Poulin’s Volkswagen Blues is a road-trip novel in the tradition of Jack Kerouac’s masterpiece, On the Road. Originally published in French in 1984, it chronicles the North American journey of Jack Waterman, a francophone writer from Quebec City, and a young woman of French and Indigenous American ancestry named La Grande Sauterelle. They are both on a quest of self-discovery, but their expedition from Quebec to San Francisco is also an allegory for Quebec’s... Read Volkswagen Blues Summary
“Walker Brothers Cowboy” by Alice Munro is a short story set during the Great Depression. The story uses the themes of The Disillusionment of Fading Childhood, The Bittersweet Effects of Nostalgia, and Finding Solace in Companionship to implicitly explore larger issues of poverty and social class. The story was published in Munro’s debut collection, Dance of the Happy Shades, in 1968. The stories in this collection are set in and around a variety of fictional... Read Walker Brothers Cowboy Summary
Set in the 1830s and beginning on a slave plantation in Barbados, Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black tells the story of the eponymous Washington and his unlikely adventures as he meditates upon the complexities of race, relationships, science, and art. In 1830, Wash is an uneducated, orphaned slave boy around 10 or 11 years old taken under the wing of Big Kit, a powerful and intimidating field slave. Big Kit protects him from the other slaves... Read Washington Black Summary
Water for Elephants, a New York Times bestseller and author Sara Gruen’s third novel, was published in 2006 by Algonquin. The novel was adapted into a full-length film in 2011 starring Reese Witherspoon and Robert Pattison.Gruen often features animals in her novels, and Water for Elephants is no exception, as she follows two lovers in a forbidden relationship set against the backdrop of a circus and its eclectic mix of characters and exotic animals. The... Read Water for Elephants Summary
We Are All Made of Molecules (May 2015) is by young adult and middle-grade author Susin Nielsen. Nielsen spent many years as a scriptwriter for Canadian television shows, including Degrassi Junior High. Her writing focuses humorously on the trials and tribulations of being a teenager. Like the characters in We Are All Made of Molecules, Nielsen lives in Vancouver, Canada. Her other titles include Word Nerd (2010), Dear George Clooney: Please Marry My Mom (2010)... Read We Are All Made of Molecules Summary
What We All Long For, written by Dionne Brand and published in 2005, tells the overlapping stories of four friends in their early- to mid-20s as they navigate Toronto as queer people, people of color, and children of immigrants.Content Warning: The source material and this guide contain instances and discussions of suicide, racism, and abuse.Tuyen is a queer woman and the daughter of Vietnamese immigrant refugees. When her parents fled Vietnam, they were separated from... Read What We All Long For Summary
Miriam Toews’s Women Talking (2018) is a novel set in the fictional Mennonite colony of Molotschna. It follows a group of the colony’s women as they discuss how to respond to the discovery that many of their menfolk have been anesthetizing and raping them for years. The book is inspired by actual events that took place between 2005 and 2009 in a remote Mennonite colony in Bolivia. There, eight men were discovered to have been... Read Women Talking Summary
