Engaging novels

Many Canadian writers explore the country’s history through novels and other creative writing. In the first of a few reading lists this fall, we present a dozen recent examples of Canadian historical fiction.

Michelle Good’s Five Little Indians, which follows teenagers in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside after their release from a residential school, is a finalist for the Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize.

In Forest Green, Governor General’s Award-winning author Kate Pullinger reaches back to the effects of the Great Depression and the Second World War upon a young man from British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley. Meanwhile, in The Place, Gary Collins explores life and crime in an isolated outport on the northeast coast of Newfoundland beginning late in the nineteenth century.

Other recently published books include stories about an artist at a prairie mental asylum, the decline of a wealthy Montreal family, and a young Irish immigrant to Canada.

Explore the list of recent historical fiction here.

In-bed reading

Recipients of the Reading Den are automatically entered to win one of three copies of John Lennon, Yoko Ono and the Year Canada Was Cool, by Greg Marquis, courtesy of James Lorimer & Company. The book uses the couple’s 1969 bed-in for peace at an upscale Montreal hotel to offer a unique portrayal of Canadian society in the late 1960s.