Canadian Fiction

A bet between the gods Hermes and Apollo leads them to grant human consciousness and language to a group of dogs overnighting at a Toronto veterinary clinic. Suddenly capable of more complex thought, the pack is torn between those who resist the new ways of thinking, preferring the old dog ways, and those who embrace the change. The gods watch from above as the dogs venture into their newly unfamiliar world, as they become divided among themselves, as each struggles with new thoughts and feelings.

Dutch-American storyteller Hilda Van Stockum provides us with another episode in the life of the Mitchell family, this time taking on life as it comes in a truly unforgettable Canadian summer.

It’s Gamache’s first day back as head of the homicide department, a job he temporarily shares with his previous second-in-command, Jean-Guy Beauvoir. Flood waters are rising across the province. In the middle of the turmoil a father approaches Gamache, pleading for help in finding his daughter. As crisis piles upon crisis, Gamache tries to hold off the encroaching chaos, and realizes the search for Vivienne Godin should be abandoned. But with a daughter of his own, he finds himself developing a profound, and perhaps unwise, empathy for her distraught father.

It's the dead of winter in Winnipeg and Wendy Reimer, a 30-year-old trans woman, feels like her life is frozen in place. When her Oma passes away Wendy receives an unexpected phone call from a distant family friend with a startling secret: Wendy's Opa (grandfather) - a devout Mennonite farmer - might have been transgender himself. At first she dismisses this revelation, but as Wendy's life grows increasingly volatile, she finds herself aching for the lost pieces of her Opa's truth.

Avan Jogia grew up as a teen idol. He stumbled into the spotlight during the birth of the internet, the early days of Instagram and Twitter, before everyone online was a star. He spent his time in that spotlight writing, observing the cult of celebrity, the hilarity, the absurdity, and sometimes sinister side of being idolized before you’ve even had the chance to decide for yourself who you are. Now, in his most revealing and honest work to date, he has assembled a book of poems as an act of self-dissection.

Norris is clever, cynical, and quite possibly too smart for his own good. A Black French Canadian, he knows from watching American sitcoms that those three things don’t bode well when you are moving to Texas. Plunked into a new high school, Norris finds himself cataloging everyone he meets: the Cheerleaders, the Jocks, the Loners, and even the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Making a ton of friends has never been a priority for him, and this way he can at least amuse himself until it’s time to go back to Canada, where he belongs. Yet those labels soon become actual people to Norris....

He's a refreshingly different hero, definitely not young and six-packed, but... Retired reporter Jake Scott knows a thing or two about exposing the truth and unmasking frauds. Unfortunately, he walks a fine line between helping and interfering in investigations. Homicide Detective Dani Perez, with whom Jake has a shaky personal relationship, doesn’t always appreciate it, but he can’t seem to help himself. The affable and shrewd, yet old fashioned, Jake is hot on the trail of a case when a body discovered in a bog and three suspects lead him to the doorstep of The Guardians of Truth, a ...

On their first night in Paris, the Gamaches gather as a family for a bistro dinner with Armand’s godfather, the billionaire Stephen Horowitz. But an attempt on the elderly man’s life sends Armand, his wife, Reine-Marie, and his former second-in-command at the Sûreté, Jean-Guy Beauvoir, from the top of the Tour d’Eiffel, to the bowels of the Paris Archives, from luxury hotels to odd, coded works of art. It sends them deep into the secrets Armand’s godfather has kept for decades.

Francesca Ekwuyasi’s debut novel tells the interwoven stories of twin sisters, Kehinde and Taiye, and their mother, Kambirinachi. Kambirinachi feels she was born an Ogbanje, a spirit that plagues families with misfortune by dying in childhood to cause its mother misery. She believes that she has made the unnatural choice of staying alive to love her human family and now lives in fear of the consequences of that decision.

Tracing the legacy of Margaret Atwood—a writer who has fundamentally shaped the contemporary literary landscapes—Paper Boat: New and Selected Poems, 1961-2023 assembles Atwood’s most vital poems in one essential volume. In pieces that are at once brilliant, beautiful, and hyper-imagined, Atwood gives voice to remarkably drawn characters—mythological figures, animals, and everyday people—all of whom have something to say about what it means to live in a world as strange as our own.

It is the height of summer, and Armand and Reine-Marie Gamache are celebrating their wedding anniversary at Manoir Bellechasse, an isolated, luxurious inn not far from the village of Three Pines. But they're not alone. The Finney family - rich, cultured, and respectable - has also arrived for a celebration of their own. The beautiful Manoir Bellechasse might be surrounded by nature, but there is something unnatural looming.

A woman drowning in sorrow. Invisible. The man that sees it all. Sees her. The only thing that gets Charlotte Prescott through the day is the haunting eyes and magnetic voice that uplifts her in the subway station every evening. All Montgomery Logan wants to do is ease the pain of the woman he feels a strange, protective draw to. He serenades her from afar, knowing their worlds will never intersect. Until the day they do. And everything changes. Will their differences make them stronger or tear them apart?

Based on first impressions, I'm the last person Ryan should hire as a nanny for the summer. With his grumpy, judgmental attitude, plus the fact that he looks annoyingly good in T-shirts, I shouldn't want the job. But since I'm fighting a custody battle and he's desperate, plus the fact that our girls are best friends, I took his offer.

Chief Inspector Armand Gamache is on break from duty in Three Pines to attend the famed Winter Carnival up north. He has arrived in this beautiful, freezing city not to join the revels but to recover from an investigation gone hauntingly wrong. Still, violent death is inescapable—even here, in the apparent sanctuary of the Literary and Historical Society, where one obsessive academic’s quest for answers will lead Gamache down a dark path.

Buying a seat belt doesn’t mean you have to necessarily crash the car, but someone forgot to tell a determined ex-Inspector Paul Devereaux. A presidential assassination, a complex political conspiracy and the murder of a data manipulating genius named Maddi Brown eventually combine to expose a group of powerful conspirators.Alison Zeigler is a maths prodigy who stumbles across a complex assassination plot when she works out what happened in Dallas on November 22nd, 1963, the day President Kennedy is murdered. So what is the link between a recognised mathematical genius, American citizen ...

Making amends for past mistakes can result in unintended consequences. Criminologist, Maeve Rosetti, returns to the small town where she grew up, aiding in the search for her missing fifteen-year-old niece while navigating a complicated relationship with the sister she left behind. Where is Jessica? The police believe she is holed up with a friend to punish her parents, but Maeve has serious questions. A couple of off-the-grid inhabitants raise suspicion. Could one of them have kidnapped Jessica? Murdered her? Then, her brother-in-law’s strange behaviour sows a seed of doubt. And there ...

Quinten Aspinall is determined to fulfill a promise he made to his deceased father to keep his family together. To do so, he must travel to Canada to find his younger siblings, who were sent there as indentured workers while Quinn was away at war. He’s also solicited by his employer to look for the man's niece, Julia, who ran off with a Canadian soldier. If Quinn can bring Julia back, he will receive his own tenant farm, enabling him to provide a home for his ailing mother and siblings.

Welcome to Three Pines, where the cruelest month is about to deliver on its threat. It's spring in the tiny, forgotten village; buds are on the trees, and the first flowers are struggling through the newly thawed earth. But not everything is meant to return to life.... When some villagers decide to celebrate Easter with a séance at the Old Hadley House, they are hoping to rid the town of its evil - until one of their party dies of fright. Was this a natural death, or was the victim somehow helped along?

It’s spring and Three Pines is reemerging after the harsh winter. But not everything buried should come alive again. Not everything lying dormant should reemerge. But something has. As the villagers prepare for a special celebration, Armand Gamache and Jean-Guy Beauvoir find themselves increasingly worried. A young man and woman have reappeared in the Sûreté du Québec investigators’ lives after many years. The two were young children when their troubled mother was murdered, leaving them damaged, shattered. Now they’ve arrived in the village of Three Pines. But to what end?

A tour-de-force debut novel about a Two-Spirit Indigiqueer young man and proud NDN glitter princess who must reckon with his past when he returns home to his reserve. “You're gonna need a rock and a whole lotta medicine” is a mantra that Jonny Appleseed, a young Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer, repeats to himself in this vivid and utterly compelling debut novel by poet Joshua Whitehead.