Some of my favourite Canadian books, in no particular order, because I love them all the same.

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William Ping’s Hollow Bamboo is a novel about the first Chinese immigrants in Newfoundland and is based on Ping’s grandfather. Ping is really, really funny, and yet writes about racism without pulling punches. The novel is devastating, clear sighted, masterfully crafted and full of magical realism and truth. 400 pages zip by in a heartbeat but the effects are lasting. I am so grateful for this book; it makes me see my home in new and disturbing ways, changes everything. This is a feat of brave, assured, elegant, wildly imaginative writing. Urgent: read now.   

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Alison Graves’ Soft Serve is tonal masterpiece when it comes to voice. Millennials joyful, sugared, crying, working, toking, lock-step with the zeitgeist, locked down with Covid,  making art and as alive as human beings can be. Think Miranda July, Miriam Toews and whoever else is saucy, uber-smart, crystal-ball prescient and somehow dangerously honest and utterly charming at the same time.  

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Jawbone by Megan Greeley, a novella about love lost and a competition to go to Mars on the next outbound spaceship. Hang on to your oxygen tank, this novella is so very beautiful it will take your breath away. Soaring prose, elegant, zippy, original, and charged with emotion. There’s something about a novella, they hit so hard and fast, full of gravitas and light as a constellation. If you have socks on, prepare to have them knocked off. 

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Corinna Chong’s Bad Land is about family, betrayals, running away and finding your way home. If you love being surprised at every turn by an unexpected word or phrase or fierce insight; if you love a courageous female character who has to struggle hard and loves anyway and pulls through; if you love museums that are upgrading with animated dinosaurs; or if you understand being obsessed with fossils, or obsessed by anything; if you have ever felt abandoned; or what it means to have your heart shattered because you’re so deep in this novel, care so much and things get worse before they get better—well, this is the novel for you.

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Sue Murtagh’s story collection We’re Not Rich­­ does all the things a story collection needs to do, penetrating the joy/terror/sadness of being human in this moment. A female office worker being pawed by her disgusting boss—this quick brief staggeringly satisfying and svelte take down of toxic masculinity is one of the best fictional moments caught on paper—ever. What is strange and elegant here is that the saddest parts are laced with humour. When a grieving mother who expresses her uncontainable rage about the death of her son has a temper tantrum by throwing swimming noodles, (like weapons, like spears, only swimming noodles don’t work that way) one after another, into the public pool, Murtagh indelibly captures the futility of fighting back when one is faced with the death of a child – and how can this be so sad and funny too? It can be because Murtagh is a magnificent writer. 

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Whenever I think about favourite books, I think about Eden Robinson’s Trickster trilogy: Son of a Trickster, Trickster Drift, and Return of the Trickster. I will never forget those three books because of the immense profound joy I felt reading them. Audacious. If there’s one thing I want in a book it’s audacity. As in, according to Webster: intrepid boldness. And I didn’t even know that’s what I was craving until I read this trilogy. Robinson cracks every expectation over her knee. One can feel the joy Eden Robinson must have felt writing these books. There’s very serious stuff in here too: suffering families, drugs, abandonment, what it means to be a mother, an absent father, but… okay, the scene where the evil Coywolves take the bad guy, tie him to a chair and dunk his hand in a boiling deep fat fryer and chew on his fingers right in front of him? The most hilarious scene I’ve ever read. Anyone who thinks the hearth is the centre of the home, and who also identifies the deep fat fryer as the symbolic hearth, (me!) will split a gut laughing. I’m going home right now to read these books again. 

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Michael Crummey’s The Adversary captures all the fear and violence of the present moment but is set in a Newfoundland outport in the late 1700s. A nightmarish, visionary tale that just might be holding a glass darkly to the polarizing politics of right now. Isn’t that what powerful historical fiction does, haul back the forest so we can see through the trees of today? Two powerful siblings, despots who hate each other immeasurably in a claustrophobic outport where everyone suffers because of their influence. The pacing gallops. Every line as vivid and uncompromising as poetry a la everything this guy writes. Think Kafka.

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Best Canadian Stories 2024. In what some might call a dick move, I am plugging an anthology of short stories that I had the great privilege of selecting last year. And while I am at it, I’m plugging the whole annual series of Best Canadian Stories that goes back decades. Like an ice core sample, or the rings of a tree, this anthology over the years gives us a history of the styles, preoccupations, voices, cultural shifts, and the careers of some of the best writers in the country. Best Canadian Stories has championed and celebrated the Canadian short story since the get-go. This also gives me an opportunity to list some of my favourite writers ever: Elise Levine, Sharon Bala, Gary Barwin and a bunch of new folks, Xaiver Michael Campbell, Sourayan Mookerjea and Sara Power. All of these stories, every single one, is stunning. 

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Larry Mathews’ The Gull Workshop and Other Stories. Many of these stories slew to a mesmeric, Dali-esque, hall-of-mirrors surrealism that paradoxically snapshots a true picture of experience. Think: Zsuzsi Gartner, just as in wildly imaginative, satirical, and also very funny but poignant, touching. Which brings me to number 10.

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Zsuzsi Gartner. Anything by Zsuzsi Gartner. But let’s say Better Living Through Plastic Explosives. Gartner’s prose is fireworks on New Year’s Eve all over the globe, bursts of Technicolor in the inky night. Brutally funny. Dead serious. Read every word.   

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Learn more about Invisible Prisons: 

Riveting nonfiction from multi-award-winning author Lisa Moore, based on the shocking true story of a teenaged boy who endured abuse and solitary confinement at a reform school in Newfoundland, but survived through grit and redemptive love.

Invisible Prisons is an extraordinary, empathetic collaboration between the magnificent writer Lisa Moore, best-known for her award-winning fiction, and a man named Jack Whalen, who as a child was held for four years at a reform school for boys in St John’s, where he suffered jaw-dropping abuses and deprivations. Despite the odds stacked against him, he found love on the other side, and managed to turn his life around as a husband and father. His daughter, Brittany, vowed at a young age to become a lawyer so that she could seek justice for him. Today, that is exactly what she is doing—and Jack's case is part of a lawsuit currently before the courts.

The story has parallels with Unholy Orders by Michael Harris about the Mount Cashel orphanage, and with the many horrific stories about residential schools—all of which expose a paternalistic state causing harm and a larger society looking away. Yet two powerful qualities set this story apart. As much as it is about an abusive system preying on children, it is also a tender tale of love between Jack and his wife Glennis, who saw the good man inside a damaged person and believed in him. And it is written in a novelistic way by the great Lisa Moore, who makes vividly real every moment and character in these pages.