Best Books from Canada
Canada has produced some of the most formally adventurous literary fiction in the English language. Alice Munro's Nobel Prize recognised a body of short stories that quietly revolutionised the form; Margaret Atwood's speculative fiction, from The Handmaid's Tale onwards, has proved prophetic in its understanding of patriarchy and power. Michael Ondaatje, Yann Martel, and Anne Michaels have brought cosmopolitan range and lyric intensity to the Canadian novel. The country's multicultural reality — Indigenous, French, immigrant, and settler — makes it one of the most various literary cultures in the world.
Top 10 from Canada
The Blind Assassin
Iris Chase narrates the story of her life and her dead sister Laura through memoir, newspaper clippings, and an embedded pulp science fiction novel. Atwood's Booker Prize-winning meta-novel is her most ambitious—a labyrinthine story of love, war, and the uses of storytelling.
Life of Pi
Pi Patel, a sixteen-year-old Indian boy, survives 227 days adrift in the Pacific Ocean on a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. Martel's Booker Prize-winning fable is a story about the necessity of storytelling and the relationship between religion, imagination, and survival.
The Stone Diaries
The life of Daisy Goodwill Flett—from her birth in 1905 to her death late in the twentieth century—is narrated in shifting perspectives and forms in Shields's Pulitzer and Booker-shortlisted novel. A quiet masterpiece of the ordinary, it examines what it means to have a woman's life go largely unrecorded.
The Handmaid's Tale
In the Republic of Gilead, a theocratic totalitarian state occupying what was once the United States, fertile women called Handmaids are forced to bear children for the ruling class. Offred narrates her daily existence and her secret resistance. Atwood's chilling speculative novel is the founding text of modern feminist dystopian fiction.
The English Patient
In an Italian villa at the end of World War II, a badly burned man of mysterious identity lies dying while being cared for by a Canadian nurse. Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning novel weaves together memory, desire, betrayal, and the wounds of war in lyrical, rhapsodic prose. It shared the Booker with Barry Unsworth's Sacred Hunger.
Spin
One night all the stars disappear, replaced by a membrane that is slowing time outside Earth while the sun ages rapidly. Three children who witness the 'spin' grow up with its consequences at the centre of their lives. Wilson's Hugo Award winner is a human-scale response to a vast cosmic mystery.
A Fine Balance
Four strangers—two tailors, a widow, and a student—come together in a Mumbai tenement during Indira Gandhi's 1975 State of Emergency. Mistry's devastating novel is one of the great novels about India, a testament to human endurance amid political terror and poverty.
The Shock Doctrine
Klein argues that free-market policies have been imposed on countries in the wake of disasters—coups, wars, natural disasters—when populations are too shocked to resist. A sweeping, controversial critique of neoliberal capitalism.
The Handmaid's Tale
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood (1985) is a notable work of classic literature from Canada.
Novels (Handmaid's Tale / Life Before Man / Surfacing)
Novels (Handmaid's Tale / Life Before Man / Surfacing) by Margaret Atwood (1990) is a notable work of science fiction from Canada.
