Wanda Jaynes is about to lose her job amidst a mountain of bills, and she suspects her musician boyfriend might be romantically interested in his friend, Trish. But Wanda’s life changes radically on a routine trip to the grocery store when a gunman enters the supermarket and opens fire.

The Greatest Hits of Wanda Jaynes is the highly anticipated debut novel by Bridget Canning, one of the most promising new writers from Newfoundland, and is an energetic page-turner about the power of selflessness in a contemporary culture of fear and suspicion.

Bridget Canning’s debut novel, The Greatest Hits of Wanda Jaynes, was a finalist for the 2017 BMO Winterset Award, the Margaret and John Savage First Book Award, and the NL Fiction Award, and was longlisted for the Dublin International Literary Award. It is currently being adapted to film. Her second novel, Some People’s Children, was a finalist for the 2020 BMO Winterset Award and the Thomas Raddall Award. Bridget holds an MA in creative writing from Memorial University and a Masters of Literacy Education from Mount Saint Vincent University. In 2019, she received the CBC Emerging Artist Award with ArtsNL. She lives in St. John’s, where she writes and teaches.

Bridget Canning's profile page

An original and impressively entertaining read from cover to cover, :The Greatest Hits of Wanda Jaynes" is very highly recommended for personal reading lists and community library General Fiction collections.

Midwest Book Review

"Through her reluctant heroine, Canning explores the privacy impacts of the new necessity to keep up via Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or wherever. When does that participation equal surrendering our privacy?"

Newfoundland Quarterly

"…energetic and witty. The phenomenon of one, then two events changing a person's life forever is believably handled and the dialogue is as punchy as an Atlantic nor'easter."

Atlantic Books Today

“Like an east-coast emotional weather report, The Greatest Hits of Wanda Jaynes exposes the sarcasm, humour, resentment, and friendship that protects the core of every heart. Bridget Canning lays bare the passel of emotions that emerge once ‘the juice is shaken out of you’.”

Michael Winter

"The Greatest Hits of Wanda Jaynes is crafted with immediate, often urgent, writing, a satisfying read, and good work."

The Telegram

“Bridget Canning is a fierce new talent.”

Lisa Moore

“Canning’s novel marks an exciting contribution to the ChickLit genre, which is an inadequate critical term for a novel that features a female protagonist who struggles through a series of tribulations on her way to securing middle-class comforts – and, girl, has the genre ever changed since the millennial years when Bridgette Jones’s Diary and Sex in the City were chart toppers… The two plots of intrigue are comedic – both threats are eventually deflated – but they nevertheless take issue with how society stigmatizes the vulnerable after a crisis. While some conceptualize ChickLit as a condescending label, Canning shows that newer works are bringing experimental aesthetics, critical themes, and progressive values to a popular genre.”

University of Toronto Quarterly 88.3