Fiction > Canadian Fiction

In this, his much-loved first novel, Leonard Cohen etches the youth and early manhood of Lawrence Breavman, the only son of wealthy Jewish parents in Montreal. Finding literary fame as a student, Breavman does penance through manual labour, before eventually fleeing to New York to escape the claims of his family and native city. In a tour de force of lyrical writing, Cohen paints a vivid, intoxicating picture of a young man's journey through the chaos and complexity of life, love and literature.

Combining spirituality with intense eroticism, wild and surreal humour with deadly serious intent, Beautiful Losers revolves around four characters - a husband, a wife, their ambiguous mentor, and a mythic seventeenth-century Irquois virgin. The lives of the couple and their friend, F., are bound together by love, sex and a lunatic spirit of experimentation, their relationship a tangle of jealousies, obsessions and affections. Cohen's brilliant and controversial book is characterised by a voice which is quite unique - lucid, tormen... read more

An immensely powerful, cathartic denunciation of poverty, ignorance, global apathy and media blindness. A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali is both a poignant love story and a stirring hymn to humanity - an essential read for anyone interested in exceptional literature of lasting value. Winner of the Prix des Libraires du Quebec in 2000.

Set in 1867, Canada. As winter tightens its grip on the isolated settlement of Dove River, a man is brutally murdered and a 17-year old boy disappears. Tracks leaving the dead man's cabin head north towards the forest and the tundra beyond. In the wake of such violence, people are drawn to the township - journalists, Hudson's Bay Company men, trappers, traders - but do they want to solve the crime, or exploit it? One-by-one the assembled searchers set out from Dove River, pursuing the tracks across a desolate landscape home only to... read more

More hilarious tales set in and around the Vinyl Cafe, from master-storyteller Stuart McLean. Dave and Morley would tell you that life is what you make it. Unfortunately for them, that means a compilation tape of mistakes, miscues, misunderstandings and muddle. That's not to say there's anything particularly unusual about them. Like the rest of us, they're just doing their best to respond to the challenges of modern life. After all, who hasn't started a small DIY job that, and only hours later found half their house demolished... read more

Introducing Dave, owner of a downtown Toronto record store and his wife, Morley, and chronicling their valiant attempts to rise to the challenges of modern life. In these hymns to common foibles and absurdities, nothing ever quite goes according to plan. A sleepover for ten small boys ends abruptly after an inadvertent screening of The Night of the Zombies; a family holiday is interrupted by a surprising feline discovery under the bonnet of the car; a balding guinea pig runs up a vet's bill for $563.30; preparations for Christm... read more

Fran has been married to Nick for more than 12 years, since they were eighteen. They are happy together until a 'little stranger' arrives, in the form of baby Louis, and their lives are irrevocably changed. The boy has good health and a sweet nature, but Fran feels stifled, her old life merely a memory. So, one day, she simply walks away. First published 2004.

Winner of Booker Prize 2002 After the tragic sinking of a cargo ship, a solitary lifeboat remains bobbing on the wild, blue Pacific. The only survivors from the wreck are a sixteen year-old boy named Pi, a hyena, a zebra (with a broken leg), a female orang-utan - and a 450-pound Royal Bengal tiger. The scene is set for one of the most extraordinary and best-loved works of fiction in recent years. First published 2001.

My mother died the same day as Marilyn Monroe. August 4th, 1962. Mom's death would force my father to 'return' to our family. Even though he came home every night, a large part of my dad was not really there. Ethie Coulter was born after her father Howard returned from the war in 1945. She never knew him as he was before, never knew that he had been an open, loving man and a devoted husband. When his wife dies in bizarre circumstances, Howard must take on the burden of looking after eleven-year-old Ethie and her two older brothers.... read more

A man is booted out of his home after his wife discovers that the sweat-smudged footprint on the inside of his windscreen doesn't match her own. Teenage cousins, drugged by summer, meet with a reckoning in the woods. A boy runs off to the carnival after his stepfather bites him in a brawl. In the stories of Wells Tower, families fall apart and messily, hilariously try to reassemble themselves. His characters - marauding Vikings, washed-up entrepreneurs, and jobbing hacks on local papers - are adrift from the mainstream, confused by... read more

'I have never looked into my sister's eyes. I have never bathed alone. I have never stood in the grass at night and raised my arms to a beguiling moon. I've never used an aeroplane bathroom. Or worn a hat. Or been kissed like that...So many things I've never done, but oh, how I've been loved. And, if such things were to be, I'd live a thousand times as me, to be loved so exponentially' The girls, Rose and Ruby Darlen, were both joined at the head (craniopagus twins) in a rural farming community in 1974. Abandoned by their frig... read more

Pigs might not fly but they are strangely altered. So, for that matter, are wolves and raccoons. A man, once called Jimmy, now calls himself Snowman and lives in a tree, wrapped in old bed sheets. The voice of Oryx, the woman he loved, teasingly haunts him. And the green-eyed Children of Crake are, for some reason, his responsibility. Welcome to the outrageous imagination of Margaret Atwood. “A highly cinematic adventure story of daring and survival.” — London Review of Books. First published 2003.

In a novel reminiscent of the work of Penelope Lively, Anne Tyler, and Alice Munro, acclaimed author Marina Endicott gives us one of the most profound and most memorable reads of the year. Absorbed in her own failings, Clara Purdy crashes her life into a sharp left turn, taking the young family in the other car along with her. When bruises on the mother, Lorraine, prove to be late-stage cancer, Clara - against all habit and comfort - moves the three children and their terrible grandmother into her own house. We know what is good,... read more

Egypt, 1964. The great temple at Abu Simbel must be dismantled and resurrected high above the rising waters of the Aswan Dam. This daunting task is overseen by Avery, a young engineer who, at the same time, is carefully building a life with his new wife, Jean. But not everything can be saved once the floodgates have opened: villages will be deluged, thousands will be exiled from their homes, and graves will be moved. And when Avery and Jean suffer a terrible loss of their own, they begin their separate journeys through the landscap... read more

A colony of Canadian and American writers and filmmakers, exiled by McCarthyist witch-hunts at home, find themselves in London, England, where they evolve a society every bit as merciless, destructive, and close-minded as that from which they have fled. The bonds of the group are strained when Norman Price, an academic turned hack writer, befriends an enigmatic German refugee. Ostracized by his colleagues, Norman soon perceives how easily conviction devolves into tyranny. Believing that "all alliances are discredited," he enters a ... read more

First published in 2005, this beautiful, haunting novel begins as Niska is reunited with her nephew, Xavier, after he returns from the horrors of the First World War. As she slowly paddles her canoe on the three day journey to take him home, travelling through the stark but stunning landscape of Northern Canada, their respective stories emerge. Niska is the last Cree Indian woman living off the land in Canada. She recalls her memories of growing up among her kinsfolk, of trying to remain true to her ancestors and traditions in a r... read more

Jakob Beer is seven years old when he is rescued from the muddy ruins of a buried village in Nazi-occupied Poland. Of his family, he is the only one who has survived. Under the guidance of the Greek geologist Athos, Jakob must steel himself to excavate the horrors of his own history. A novel of astounding beauty and wisdom, Fugitive Pieces is a profound meditation on the resilience of the human spirit and love's ability to resurrect even the most damaged of hearts.

It is the 1970s in Northern California. A farmer and his teenage daughters, Anna and Claire, work the land with the help of Coop, the enigmatic young man who lives with them. Theirs is a makeshift family, until they are riven by an incident of violence - of both hand and heart - that 'sets fire to the rest of their lives'. Anna will come to rest in the calming landscape of south-central France. There, she delves into the story of a writer who, decades earlier, lived in the isolated house she now occupies - a story that circles ar... read more

A big, sweeping Canadian epic from the Booker-longlisted author of The Stone Carvers Jerome is a young earth-artist spending a few months on an island in Lake Ontario. His idyll is shattered when he stumbles across a man frozen in the ice near the shore.A year later, Sylvia, a middle aged woman, shows up at his studio in Toronto. She was the lover of the dead man. Andrew's ice-encased body has haunted Jerome's dreams; Sylvia has never recovered from losing the only man she has ever loved. And now before she forgets, before the past... read more

"Margaret Atwood has long been praised for the wit, sympathy and intelligence she brings to her depictions of ordinary people struggling with life's complexities. In Moral Disorder, she again draws on common experiences - the birth of a baby, divorce and remarriage, old age and death - to dramatic, often humorous, and telling effect.At twelve, the narrator of The Art of Cooking and Serving does her best to accommodate the arrival of a baby sister. As the years pass, however, the satisfaction of helping her distracted mother gives w... read more