Denise Chong, The Concubine’s Children. A family history starting with Chong’s grandfather and his two wives, the official and the concubine. The first stayed in China with some of the children, the second made a life in Canada. The two families suffered very different fates. A vivid account which raises bigger issues about the immigrant experience and how there can be both losses and gains.

Max Ferguson, And Now... Here’s Max. Both very funny and interesting as you would expect from a man who in his time was a leading broadcaster and a comedian. Interesting too about the CBC sixty years ago.

Allan Gotlieb, The Washington Diaries. Allan Gotlieb was the senior civil servant in the Department of Foreign Affairs when Prime Minister Trudeau appointed him Canada’s ambassador to Washington. Gotlieb had a ringside seat in the Reagan administration and more influence than almost any Canadian ambassador before or since. Between them he and his equally skilled wife Sondra got to know almost everyone who mattered in Washington. His diaries are a lovely mix of acute political observation and gossip.

Susanna Moodie, Roughing it in the Bush. A Canadian classic where a middle-class Englishwoman encounters life in the Canadian bush in the 1830s—and survives. Her sister, Catharine Parr Traill’s The Backwoods of Canada is also well worth a read.

Ken McNaught, Conscience and History. A Memoir. A picture of an idyllic childhood in the Toronto of the 1930s which shows that the city was not just the grim Presbyterian stronghold it is so often pictured as. It was also a place where the arts, and even a mild Bohemianism, could survive. Also interesting on Canadian universities including the Harry Crowe affair, that great row at the University of Winnipeg in the 1950s over freedom of speech.

Charles Ritchie, Diaries. There are several volumes of these, all well worth reading but I particularly liked the first An Appetite for Life: The Education of a Young Diarist, 1924-1927. It is a lovely evocation of growing up. The later The Siren Years: A Canadian Diplomat Abroad 1937-1945 is fascinating about the London of the 1930s and the war and Ritchie’s own extraordinary circle of friends.

Robert de Roquebrune, Testament of my Childhood. Sadly out of print, this is a minor classic with its account of the vanished world of Quebec manor-houses and the old French families who lived in them.

Mrs Simcoe’s Diary. Arriving in 1790s in Canada before there was a Canada and when there was only the barest beginnings of Toronto, Mrs Simcoe entered into the life of the wife of the Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada with huge enthusiasm and curiosity. Her descriptions from the flora and fauna to the people she encountered are marvellous and vivid.

Rudy Wiebe, Of This Earth: A Mennonite Boyhood in the Boreal Forest. A beautifully-written account of life in the north of Saskatchewan which combines an acute awareness of nature as well as the people who lived, suffered and thrived in a difficult country. And like several of other books on my list it has something to say about the experience of immigrants in this country.

A historian and professor, Margaret MacMillan is the author of three books including Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World, which won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction, PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize and the Duff Cooper Prize. Paris 1919 was nominated for the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction in 2004. She received her PhD from Oxford University and was a provost of Trinity College and professor of history at the University of Toronto.