Margaret Atwood Surfacing (Virago/Fawcett).
Canada's most eminent novelist is not always easy reading, but her
analysis, particularly of women and society, is invariably witty
and penetrating. In Surfacing (Virago/Fawcett), the remote
landscape of northern Québec plays an instrumental part in an
extreme voyage of self-discovery. Regeneration through exploration
of the past is also the theme of Cat's Eye
(Virago/Doubleday) and Lady Oracle (Virago/Doubleday), while
the collection of short stories Wilderness Tips
(Virago/Bantam) sees women ruminating over the bastards in their
lives. Alias Grace (Virago/Doubleday) is a dark and sensual
tale centred around the true story of one of Canada's most
notorious female criminals of the 1840's. Atwood's latest offering,
The Blind Assassin (Bloomsbury/Bantam Doubleday Dell), is a
"Canadian dynastic epic" and won the prestigious Booker Prize in
the UK in 2000.
Robertson Davies For many years the leading figure of
Canada's literary scene, Davies died in 1995 at the age of 82.
Amongst his considerable output are big, dark and complicated webs
of familial and social history which include wonderful evocations
of the semi-rural Canada of his youth. A good place to start is
What's Bred in the Bone , part of The Cornish Trilogy
, whose other titles are The Rebel Angels and The Lyre of
Orpheus (all Penguin). Similarly intriguing is Fifth
Business (Penguin), the first part of The Deptford
Trilogy .
Lovat Dickson Wilderness Man (Abacus, UK, o/p).
The fascinating story of Archie Belaney, the Englishman who became
famous as his adopted persona, Grey Owl. Written by his English
publisher and friend, who was one of many that did not discover the
charade until after Grey Owl's death.
William Gibson Virtual Light (Penguin/Bantam Spectra) and
Idoru (Penguin/Berkeley) are the best recent books from the master
of cyberdom. The impact of technologies on human experience and the
overlapping of artifice and reality are his significant themes.
Hammond Innes Campbell's Kingdom
(Pan/Addison-Wesley). A melodrama of love and oil-drilling in the
Canadian Rockies - though the landscape's less well evoked than in
The Land God Gave to Cain (Pan/Carroll & Graf, o/p), the
story of one man's search for "gold and truth" in Labrador.
Margaret Laurence A Jest of God; The Stone Angel; The
Diviners (all Virago/University of Chicago Press).
Manitoba-born Laurence epitomized the new vigour that swept through
the country's literature during the Sixties - though the best of
her fiction was written in England. Most of her books are set in
the fictional prairie backwater of Manawaka, and explore the
loneliness and frustration of women within an environment of
stifling small-town conventionality. Always highly revered at home,
Laurence's reputation is on the increase abroad.
Stephen Leacock Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town
(McClelland & Stewart/New Canadian Library). Whimsical tale of
Ontario small-town life; the best of a series based on the author's
summertime stays in Orillia.
Jack London The Call of the Wild; White Fang and Other
Stories (Penguin). London spent over a year in the Yukon gold
fields during the Klondike gold rush. Many of his experiences found
their way into his vivid if sometimes overwrought tales of the
northern wilderness, but he left behind a burning evocation of the
North.
Malcolm Lowry Hear Us O Lord from Heaven thy Dwelling
Place (Carroll & Graf). Lowry spent almost half his writing
life (1939-54) in log cabins and beach houses he built for himself
around Vancouver. Hear Us O Lord is a difficult read to say
the least: a fragmentary novella which, amongst other things,
describes a disturbing sojourn on Canada's wild Pacific coast.
Ann-Marie MacDonald . Fall on Your Knees
(Vintage/Simon & Schuster). Entertaining, epic-style family
saga from this young, Toronto-based writer with an astute eye for
characters and a fine storytelling touch. The novel follows the
fortunes of four sisters from Halifax, against a backdrop which
sweeps from World War II to the New York jazz scene.
Alistair MacLeod No Great Mischief (Cape). This
forceful, evocative novel tells the tale of a family of
Gaelic-speaking Nova Scotians from Cape Breton. Some of the
episodes are brilliantly written - others less so - but it is still
one of the best Canadian novels of the 1990s.
Anne Michaels Fugitive Pieces (Bloomsbury/Knopf).
This debut novel from an award-winning poet concerns survivors from
the Nazis who emigrate to Canada. Their relationship deepens but
memory and the past are never far away. A beautiful work.
W.O. Mitchell Who Has Seen the Wind
(Canongate/Little, Brown). Canada's equivalent of Huckleberry
Finn is a folksy story of a young boy coming of age in
small-town Saskatchewan, with great offbeat characters and fine
evocations of prairie life. Mitchell's The Vanishing Point
(Macmillan, US), though witty and fun to read, is a moving
testimony to the complexities of native assimilation in a country
dominated by "immigrants".
L.M. Montgomery Anne of Green Gables
(Puffin/Pengiun). Growing pains and bucolic bliss in a children's
classic from 1908. Bound to appeal to little girls of all ages.
Brian Moore Black Robe (Flamingo/NAL-Dutton).
Moore emigrated to Canada from Ireland in 1948 and stayed long
enough to gain citizenship before moving on to California. Black
Robe - the story of a missionary's journey into native
territory - is typical of the author's preoccupations with
Catholicism, repression and redemption.
Alice Munro Lives of Girls and Women
(Penguin/NAL-Dutton); The Progress of Love
(Vintage/Penguin); The Beggar Maid (Penguin); Friend of
My Youth (Vintage); Dance of the Happy Shades
(Penguin/Vintage); Who Do You Think You Are? (Penguin);
Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You (Penguin/Plume);
The Moons of Jupiter (Penguin). Amongst the world's finest
living short-story writers, Munro deals primarily with the lives of
women in the semi-rural and Protestant backcountry of southwest
Ontario. Unsettling emotions are never far beneath the surface.
Among her more recent works, Open Secrets (Vintage) focuses
on stories set in two small Ontario towns from the days of the
early settlers to the present.
New Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories in English (ed
Margaret Atwood and Robert Weaver; OUP). A broad selection which
delves beyond the better-known names of Alice Munro and Margaret
Atwood, with space being given to diaspora writers. While the
intention is to celebrate Canadian writing, some of the works offer
a stangely negative view of the country.
Michael Ondaatje In the Skin of a Lion
(Picador/McKay) Highly charged work with intriguing insights into
the essence of Toronto and its people.
Oxford Book of Canadian Ghost Stories (OUP, US, o/p).
Over twenty stories, including W.P. Kinsella's Shoeless Joe
Jackson Comes to Iowa - the inspiration for the fey Field of
Dreams .
Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature (OUP, o/p). At
almost 900 pages, this is the last word on the subject, though it
is more useful as a work of reference than as a primer for the
country's literature.
E. Annie Proulx The Shipping News (Fourth
Estate/Simon & Schuster). The 1994 Pulitzer Prize-winner is a
rambling, inconclusive narrative of a social misfit who finds love
and happiness of sorts in small-town Newfoundland. Superb
descriptions of sea, weather and all things fishy (as distinct from
some very average characterization) make it an essential primer for
any visitor to the province.
Nino Ricci Where Has She Gone? (McClelland &
Stewart). The third in a trilogy that began with Lives of the
Saints , this book is about an Italian-Canadian family's
sometimes tragic attempts to find its identity.
Mordecai Richler French-Canadian, working-class and
Jewish - Yiddishkeit is Richler's bag. He is the laureate of the
minority within a minority within a minority. All his novels
explore this relation with broad humour and pathos. In The
Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (Penguin), Richler uses his
early experiences of Montréal's working-class Jewish ghetto in many
of his novels, especially in this, his best-known work, an acerbic
and slick cross-cultural romance built around the ambivalent but
tightly drawn figure of Kravitz. Richler's pushy and ironic prose
is not to all tastes, but you might also try Solomon Gursky Was
Here (Vintage/DIANE) or his latest book, Barney's Version
(Chatto & Windus/Knopf) - a rip-roaring comic portrait of a
reckless artist manqué .
Carol Shields Happenstance; The Stone Diaries; Larry's
Party (all Fourth Estate/Penguin). Winner of the Pulitzer
Prize, Shields is much lauded for the detail she finds in the
everyday. There are moments of great beauty and sensitivity in
these books which chronicle frankly the experiences of bourgeois
North American suburbia.
Elizabeth Smart By Grand Central Station I Sat Down
and Wept (Flamingo/Vintage). A cult masterpiece which lyrically
details the writer's love affair with the English poet George
Barker.
Susan Swan The Wives of Bath (Alfred J. Knopf). At
a Toronto girls' school in the Sixties, the protagonist, Mouse,
struggles with notions of feminine beauty as her best friend
struggles with gender identity. A wry novel written in a genre the
author describes as "sexual gothic".
Audrey Thomas The Wild Blue Yonder (Fourth
Estate). A collection of witty tales about male- female
relationships by a renowned Canadian short-story writer.
Jane Urquhart The Underpainter
(Bloomsbury/Viking). A painful book concerning the life of a
narcissistic painter who uses and leaves his muse but ultimately
finds the demands of art destroy his humanity.
John Wyndham The Chrysalids (Penguin/Carroll
& Graf). A science-fiction classic built around a group of
telepathic children and their adventures in post-Holocaust
Labrador.