Read Across Canada + Canada Day Sale! 🍁
Canada Day Long Weekend Sale!
Save 25% off all available titles from July 1 to 3, 2022 at 11:59 pm.
Use code CANADA2022 at checkout.
*Discount applies to print books, eBooks, and audiobooks. Excludes all forthcoming fall 2022 releases.
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🍁 Read Across Canada! 🍁
Travel Canada this long weekend with some homegrown literature! This curated list of books rooted in cities and places is an ode to the richness and diversity of Canadian life:
ALL ACROSS CANADA
My Conversations With Canadians by Lee Maracle
Questions around such subjects as citizenship, segregation, labour, law, prejudice and reconciliation (to name a few), are at the heart of the late great Lee Maracle’s My Conversations with Canadians. In prose essays that are both conversational and direct, the beloved writer, teacher, and activist seeks not to provide any answers to these questions. Rather, she thinks through each one using a multitude of experiences she had as a First Nations leader, a woman, a mother, and grandmother over the course of her life.
ALL ACROSS CANADA
Write Across Canada: An Anthology of Emerging Writers curated by Joseph Kertes and Geoffrey Taylor
The stories and poems gathered in Write Across Canada showcase a mere sampling of emerging writers working in Canada today. Featuring contributions from nineteen contributors including Conor Kerr, Matthew James Weigel, Sarah Mintz, and more.
NEWFOUNDLAND
We, Jane by Aimee Wall
Searching for meaning in her Montreal life, Marthe begins an intense friendship with an older woman, also from Newfoundland, who tells her a story about purpose, about a duty to fulfill. It’s back home, and it goes by the name of Jane. Marthe travels back to a small community on the island with the older woman to continue the work of an underground movement in 60s Chicago: abortion services performed by women, always referred to as Jane. She commits to learning how to continue this legacy and protect such essential knowledge. But the nobility of her task and the reality of small-town life compete, and personal fractures within their group begin to grow.
MONTREAL, QC
A Convergence of Solitudes by Anita Anand
A story of identity, connection, and forgiveness, A Convergence of Solitudes presents the lives of two families across the Partition of India, Vietnam’s Operation Babylift, and two Quebec referendums. Award-winning author Anand’s debut novel “paints a multicultural portrait of Montreal as characters converge on the city from around the world: India, Vietnam, England, Ireland,” writes Neil Smith.
GRANDE MÉRE, QC
Document 1 by François Blais, translated by JC Sutcliffe
In this tragicomic novel by the late Quebecois writer François Blais, Tess and Jude live in the small-town of Grand Mère, Quebec and spend their time travelling all across North America—using Google maps—which provides them the luxury of adventure while remaining in the comfort of their own home. But Tess and Jude are dreamers, and their online adventures eventually give rise to a desire to actually travel somewhere.
TORONTO
Letters to Amelia by Lindsay Zier-Vogel
Grace Porter is reeling from grief after her partner of seven years unexpectedly leaves. Amidst her heartache, the thirty-year-old tech at Toronto’s Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library is tasked with reading newly discovered letters that Amelia Earhart wrote to her lover, Gene Vidal. Letter by letter, Grace understands more about Amelia while piecing her own life back together.
BURLINGTON, ON
Coconut Dreams by Derek Mascarenhas
In his acclaimed debut story collection, Derek Mascarenhas takes a fresh look at the world of the new immigrant and the South Asian experience in Canada. Coconut Dreams explores the lives of the Pinto family through seventeen linked short stories.Starting with a ghost story set in Goa, India in the 1950s, the collection weaves through various timelines and perspectives to focus on two children, Aiden and Ally Pinto. These siblings tackle their adventures in a predominantly white suburb with innocence, intelligence, and a timid foot in two distinct cultures.
PRINCE EDWARD COUNTY, ON
Polar Vortex by Shani Mootoo
Priya and Alexandra have moved from the city to a picturesque countryside town. What Alex doesn’t know is that Priya is running from her past—from a fraught relationship with an old friend, Prakash, who pursued her for many years, both online and off. Time has passed, and Priya, confident that her ties to Prakash have been successfully severed, decides it’s once again safe to establish an online presence. Seductive and tension-filled, this Giller Prize-nominated novel is a story of secrets, deceptions, and revenge.
SUDBURY, ON
Her Paraphernalia: On Motherlines, Sex, Blood, Loss & Selfies by Margaret Christakos
How does a contemporary woman write a life’s umbilical attachments to the lives around her, lives formed in and by other histories and times, relations living and dying and dead? How does she see what remains her own, despite midlife’s losses? Formed of ten intimate études largely set in Sudbury that move from considerations of mothering, sex and photography to settler bloodlines, erasure and divorce, Christakos’s intergenre collection is a love song to her mother and daughter.
WINNIPEG
Bridge Retakes by Angela Lopes
Bridge Retakes is a whirlwind millennial tale of love and family and the distances that people will (or won’t) go to secure what they want. A Bahian man and a Brazilian-Canadian woman living in Winnipeg meet on an online dating site. They come from very different worlds—geographically, economically, religiously—and yet, their connection is undeniable. When these long-distance lovers run up against their own belief systems and those of their families and communities, it’s their desire to build a life anew that keeps them moving forward. But all the while, issues of money, class, gender, and corruption threaten to tear them apart.
CALGARY
Prose of the Trans-Canada by derek beaulieu
“Prose of the Trans-Canada” is a towering moment in derek beaulieu’s ongoing exploration of letraset as a medium for concrete poetry. Created in response to “Prose of the Trans-Siberian” by Blais Cendrars, beaulieu’s 16″ x 52″ visual poem was projected onto the Calgary Tower to celebrate his former appointment as the 2014-16 Calgary Poet Laureate.
VANCOUVER
Dear Current Occupant by Chelene Knight
Chelene Knight’s acclaimed memoir about home and belonging set in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside won the 2018 City of Vancouver Book Award. Using a variety of forms including letters, essays, and poems, she reflects on her childhood through a series of letters addressed to all the current occupants now living in the twenty different houses she moved in and out of with her mother and brother. From blurry and fragmented non-chronological memories of trying to fit in with her own family as the only mixed East Indian/Black child, to crystal clear recollections of parental drug use, Knight draws a vivid portrait of memory that still longs for a place and a home.
