I Read Canadian
As a Canadian-owned and operated company, McNally Robinson has always put a special emphasis on Canadian authors and their books. Featured here are some of our booksellers' favourite Canadian books.
Hope by Terry Fox
- Barbara Adhiya 
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Inside the mind of a Canadian icon -- the highs, lows, and miles he conquered
Featuring excerpts from Terry's very own Marathon of Hope journal
In 1976, when Terry Fox was just eighteen years old, he was diagnosed with osteosarcoma and his right leg was amputated just above the knee. It quickly became his mission to help cure cancer so others would not have to endure what he had gone through. He dreamed up a Marathon of Hope -- a fundraising run across Canada, from St. John's, Newfoundland, to Victoria, British Columbia. 7,560 kilometers. 4,700 miles.
When he set off on April 12, 1980, Canadians were dubious. But as he continued across the country, enthusiasm grew to a frenzy. Sadly, Terry's cancer returned, and after 143 days and 3,339 miles, he was forced to stop his Marathon of Hope. He passed away in 1981, but the nation picked up his mission where he left off, and the annual Terry Fox Run has even spread to cities around the world, raising more than $850 million to date -- well over Terry's goal of one dollar for every Canadian.
After conducting over fifty interviews with people throughout Terry's life -- ranging from his siblings, nurses, and coaches to volunteers during the Marathon of Hope -- editor Barbara Adhiya discovers how Terry was able to run a marathon a day. Through their stories, passages from Terry's marathon journal, and over 200 photos and documents, Hope shows that with enough resilience, determination, humility, and support, ordinary people can do impossible things.
At a Loss for Words
- Carol Off
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$36.95
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Award-winning author and broadcast journalist Carol Off digs deep into six words whose meanings have been distorted and weaponized in recent years--including democracy, freedom and truth--and asks whether we can reclaim their value.
As co-host of CBC Radio's As It Happens, Carol Off spent a decade and a half talking to people in the news five nights a week. On top of her stellar writing and reporting career, those 25,000 interviews have given her a unique vantage point on the crucial subject at the heart of her new book--how, in these polarizing years, words that used to define civil society and social justice are being put to work for a completely different political agenda. Or they are being bleached of their meaning as the values they represent are mocked and distorted. As Off writes, "If our language doesn't have a means to express an idea, then the idea itself is gone--even the range of thought is diminished." And, as she argues, that's a dangerous loss.
In six, wide-ranging chapters, Off explores the mutating meanings and the changing political impact of her six chosen words--freedom, democracy, truth, woke, choice and taxes--unpacking the forces, from right and left, that have altered them beyond recognition. She also shows what happens when we lose our shared political vocabulary: we stop being able to hear each other, let alone speak with each other in meaningful ways. This means we stop being able to reckon with the complexity of the crises we face, leaving us prey to conspiracy theories, autocrats and the machinations of greed. At a Loss for Words is both an elegy and a call to arms.
Bad Houses
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A boisterous collection of surreal, darkly humourous short stories that will delight fans of George Saunders and Kelly Link
From John Elizabeth Stintzi, the mind that created the daringly bizarre novel My Volcano, comes an electrifying collection of strange and dark tales.
In the surreal, often precarious realities of Bad Houses, a doctor discovers a double-edged cure for the Ebola virus, a college student loses a different body part each time they return home for the summer, Midas's hairdresser strives to keep his secrets, and a young girl develops a fascination with the trolls who harvest her father's pumpkin patch. At once humourous and horrifying, these stories will inevitably take residence in your mind.
Present throughout Bad Houses is a deep and abiding sense of humanity sprinkled with a dash of alienation, guilt, and instability. Filtered through a fabulist lens, these stories contemplate the struggles of modern existence. Each character lives their own haunted life, trying to navigate the path from bad houses to good homes.
Featuring Stintzi's own expressive ink illustrations, Bad Houses is a book that feels like it was penned by a trans Alice Munro mixed with a bubblier Franz Kafka. Enter if you dare.
March Roars
- Maureen Jennings
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"A grave injustice." Those are the words in the letter sent to Charlotte Frayne, P.I., on a cold March morning. The newspapers have reported on the arrest of two Black teenagers in a burglary, but did the pair actually commit the crime? Not according to the letter's sender, Mrs. Olivia Brodie. A resident of the Toronto House of Industry -- "the poor house" -- Mrs. Brodie was running an early morning errand when she witnessed, on the morning of the crime, two men behaving in a suspicious manner near the burgled home: two white men. Meanwhile, Charlotte is investigating another theft -- this one at the home of a woman on the opposite end of the social hierarchy. As she juggles her investigations, Charlotte finds unexpected links between people and personal histories, along with more than one "grave injustice."
Everything and Nothing At All
- Jenny Heijun Wills
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"Here is my disconnect: the private and public self. My mind and body. The real person and curated spectacle. . . . Are there actual roots with which to fasten this performance to anything real?"
As a transnational and transracial adoptee, Jenny Heijun Wills has spent her life navigating the fraught spaces of ethnicity and belonging. As a pan-polyam individual, she lives between types of family--adopted, biological, chosen--and "community"; heternormativity and queerness; commitment and a constellation of love. And as a parent with a lifelong eating disorder, who self-harms to cope with mental illness, her love language is to feed, but daily she wishes her body would disappear. These facets of Wills' being have served as the anchors she once clung to and the harsh parameters of what others now imagine she can be.
Everything and Nothing At All weaves together a lifetime of literary criticism, cultural study, and a personal history into a staggering tapestry of knowledge. And though the experiences of accumulating this knowledge have often been shot through with pain, Wills spins these threads into priceless gold--a radical, fearless vision of kinship and family. Devastating, illuminating, and beautifully crafted, these essays breathe life into the ambiguities and excesses of Wills' self, transforming them into something more--something that could be everything.
In Winter I Get Up at Night
- Jane Urquhart
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$36.00
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INSTANT NATIONAL BESTELLER o Longlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize o One of Indigo's Most Anticipated Books o One of the CBC's Canadian Fiction Books to Read in Fall 2024
From one of the greatest writers of our time comes a profound and moving novel of an unforgettable life.
In the early morning dark, Emer McConnell rises for a day of teaching music in the schools of rural Saskatchewan. While she travels the snowy roads in the gathering light, she begins another journey, one of recollection and introspection, and one that, through the course of Jane Urquhart's brilliant new novel, will leave the reader forever changed.
Moving as effortlessly through time as the drift of memory itself, In Winter I Get Up at Night brings Emer and her singular story to life. At the age of 11, she is terribly injured in an enormous prairie storm--the "great wind" that shifts her trajectory forever. As she recovers, separated from her family in a children's ward, Emer gets to know her fellow patients, a memorable group including a child performer who stars in a travelling theatre company, the daughter of a Dukhobor community, and the son of a leftist Jewish farm collective. The children are tended to by three nursing sisters and two doctors, whom the ever-imaginative Emer comes to call Doctor Angel and Doctor Carpenter.
Emer's tale grows outwards from that ward, reaching through time and space in a dreamlike fashion, recounting the stories of her mother's entanglement with a powerful yet mysterious teacher; her brother's dawning spirituality, which eventually leads him to the priesthood; the remarkable lives of the nuns who care for her; and the passionate yet distant love affair of Emer and an enigmatic man she calls Harp--a brilliant scientist whose great discovery has forever altered millions of lives around the world.
In luminous prose, and with exhilarating nuance and depth, Jane Urquhart charts an unforgettable life, while also exploring some of the grandest themes of the twentieth century--colonial expansion, scientific progress, and the sinister forces that seek to divide societies along racial and cultural lines. In Winter I Get Up at Night is a major work of imagination and self-exploration from one of the greatest writers of our time.
The Knowing
- Tanya Talaga
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From Tanya Talaga, the critically acclaimed and award-winning author of Seven Fallen Feathers, comes a riveting exploration of her family's story and a retelling of the history of the country we now call Canada
For generations, Indigenous People have known that their family members disappeared, many of them after being sent to residential schools, "Indian hospitals" and asylums through a coordinated system designed to destroy who the First Nations, Métis and Inuit people are. This is one of Canada's greatest open secrets, an unhealed wound that until recently lay hidden by shame and abandonment.
The Knowing is the unfolding of Canadian history unlike anything we have ever read before. Award-winning and bestselling Anishinaabe author Tanya Talaga retells the history of this country as only she can--through an Indigenous lens, beginning with the life of her great-great grandmother Annie Carpenter and her family as they experienced decades of government- and Church-sanctioned enfranchisement and genocide.
Deeply personal and meticulously researched, The Knowing is a seminal unravelling of the centuries-long oppression of Indigenous People that continues to reverberate in these communities today.
Salvage
- Dionne Brand
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$36.00
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In Salvage: Readings from the Wreck, Dionne Brand's first major book of non-fiction since her classic A Map to the Door of No Return, the acclaimed poet and novelist offers a bracing look at the intersections of reading and life, and of what remains in the wreck of empire. Blending literary crticism and autobiography-as artifact, Brand reads Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, among other still-widely studied works, to explore encounters with colonial, imperialist and racist tropes from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century--tropes that continue in new forms today. Brand vividly shows how contemporary practices of reading and writing are shaped by the narrative structures of these and related works; and explores how, in the face of this, one writes a narrative of Black life that attends to its own consciousness and expression.
With the power and eloquence of a great poet coupled with the rigour of a deep and subtle thinker, Brand reveals how she learned to read the literature of two empires, British and American, in an anti-colonial light--in order to survive, and in order to live.
This is the library, the wreck, and the potential for salvage she offers us now, in a brilliant, groundbreaking and essential work.
I Feel That Way Too
- jaz papadopoulos
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Lambda Literary Fellow jaz papadopoulos offers a poetically critical look at how sexual assault trials impact survivors. A critical response to the #MeToo movement, I Feel That Way Too is an experiment in narrative poetics. It weaves through past and present, drawing together art, philosophy, the Jian Ghomeshi trial and childhood memory to interrogate how media and social power structures sustain patriarchal ideologies. Inspired by the works of Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Anne Carson, A.M. O'Malley and Isobel O'Hare, these poems are lyrical and meditative, moving to make sense of the nervous system in battle and in recovery.
The Longest Road
- Joe Calendino ,
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Recovery is the longest road toward a better future.
"When you are that far into addiction, one of the things you are ruled by, you live for, is the drug. It becomes your mother, your father, your sister, your brother, your lover."
In The Longest Road, Joe Calendino relives his harrowing journey from full-patch Hells Angel to rock bottom. Consumed by drugs and alcohol, he spiralled out of control and ended up strung out, desperate and destitute. Now it's his mission to protect at-risk youth from that same fate.
Written with his trusted confidant and former high school counsellor, Gary Little, this gripping memoir shares more than Calendino's story of relapse and redemption. It also tells the stories of the hidden angels who helped save his life, and the lives of the young people he now strives to help in his role as executive director of Yo Bro Yo Girl Youth Initiative. There are families who have lost loved ones to overdose, friends whose habits have landed them in gangs or in jail, and the call to action of a community that needs help, healing and hope--now more than ever.
Building on his first page-turning memoir, To Hell and Back, Calendino again shows he is living proof that sometimes all it takes is someone believing in you to completely change your life.
Hair for Men
- Michelle Winters
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The second novel by Scotiabank Giller Prize finalist Michelle Winters teems with hot towel shaves and the steady thrum of female rage.
Spurred by adolescent trauma, Louise adopts a life of hardcore punk violence until she stumbles into a job at a mysterious men's hair salon, where her unique relationship with her clientele shows her a more perfect world-or so it seems. When that world is overturned, she flees to a marina on the East Coast, where she lives free from reminders of her past-except the duffle-bagged ones she jettisons nightly in a forsaken cove. But on the day of the Tragically Hip's 2016 farewell performance in Kingston, a man surfaces from the Bay of Fundy, rousing long-dormant urges and giving Louise an unexpected gift: the chance to make things right.
Funny, warm, and furious, Hair for Men is a subversive exploration of gender, forgiveness, and chucking convention.
The Librarianist
- Patrick deWitt
Hardcover
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THE INSTANT #1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER
Winner, 2024 Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour
From bestselling and award-winning author Patrick deWitt comes the story of Bob Comet, a man who has lived his life through and for literature, unaware that his own experience is a poignant and affecting narrative in itself.
Bob Comet is a retired librarian passing his solitary days surrounded by books and small comforts in a mint-colored house in Portland, Oregon. One morning on his daily walk he encounters a confused elderly woman lost in a market and returns her to the senior center that is her home. Hoping to fill the void he's known since retiring, he begins volunteering at the center. Here, as a community of strange peers gathers around Bob, and following a happenstance brush with a painful complication from his past, the events of his life and the details of his character are revealed.
Behind Bob Comet's straight-man façade is the story of an unhappy child's runaway adventure during the last days of the Second World War, of true love won and stolen away, of the purpose and pride found in the librarian's vocation, and of the pleasures of a life lived to the side of the masses. Bob's experiences are imbued with melancholy but also a bright, sustained comedy; he has a talent for locating bizarre and outsized players to welcome onto the stage of his life.
With his inimitable verve, skewed humor, and compassion for the outcast, Patrick deWitt has written a wide-ranging and ambitious document of the introvert's condition. The Librarianist celebrates the extraordinary in the so-called ordinary life, and depicts beautifully the turbulence that sometimes exists beneath a surface of serenity.
Lytton
- Peter Edwards , Kevin Loring
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$36.00
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NATIONAL BESTSELLER
From bestselling true-crime author Peter Edwards and Governor General's Award-winning playwright Kevin Loring, two sons of Lytton, the BC town that burned to the ground in 2021, comes a meditation on hometown-when hometown is gone.
"It's dire," Greta Thunberg retweeted Mayor Jan Polderman. "The whole town is on fire. It took a whole 15 minutes from the first sign of smoke to, all of a sudden, there being fire everywhere."
Before it made global headlines as the small town that burned down during a record-breaking heat wave in June 2021, while briefly the hottest place on Earth, Lytton, British Columbia, had a curious past. Named for the author of the infamous line, "It was a dark and stormy night," Lytton was also where Peter Edwards, organized-crime journalist and author spent his childhood. Although only about 500 people lived in Lytton, Peter liked to joke that he was only the second-best writer to come from his tiny hometown. His grade-school classmate's nephew Kevin Loring, Nlaka'pamux from Lytton First Nation, had grown up to be a Governor General's Award-winning playwright.
The Nlaka'pamux called Lytton "The Centre of the World," a view Buddhists would share in the late twentieth century, as they set up a temple just outside town. A gold rush in 1858 saw conflict with a wave of Californians come to a head with the Canyon War at the junction of the mighty Fraser and Thompson rivers. The Nlaka'pamux lost over thirty lives in that conflict, as did the American gold seekers. In modern times, many outsiders would seek shelter there, often people who just didn't fit anywhere else and were hoping for a little anonymity in the mountains.
Told from the shared perspective of an Indigenous playwright and the journalist son of a settler doctor who pushed back against the divisions that existed between populations, Lytton portrays all the warmth, humour and sincerity of small-town life. A colourful little town that burned to the ground could be every town's warning if we don't take seriously what this unique place has to teach us.
On Canadian Democracy
- Jonathan Manthorpe
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Using the decrepit state of 24 Sussex Drive, the official residence of the Prime Minister of Canada, as a metaphor for Canada's democracy, Jonathan Manthorpe examines the foundations, supports, and systems that are meant to keep our parliament a representative body, an actual voice of the people, and he offers insights as to how this institution can be renovated to the benefit of all. Jonathan Manthorpe is the author of the national bestseller, Claws of the Panda: Beijing's Campaign of Influence and Intimidation in Canada, and Restoring Democracy in an Age of Populists and Pestilence.
That Night in the Library
- Eva Jurczyk
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"Once you enter the library, there's no turning back." --Elle Cosimano, New York Times bestselling author of the Finlay Donovan mysteries
From critically acclaimed librarian and author Eva Jurczyk comes That Night in the Library, a chilling literary mystery that transports readers to a world where secrets live in the dark, books breathe fears to life, and the only way out is to wait until morning.
On the night before graduation, seven students gather in the basement of their university's rare books library. They're not allowed in the library after closing time, but it's the perfect place for the ritual they want to perform--one borrowed from the Greeks, said to free those who take part in it from the fear of death. And what better time to seek the wisdom of ancient gods than in the hours before they'll scatter in different directions to start their real lives?
But just a few minutes into their celebration, the lights go out--and one of them drops dead. As the body count rises, with nothing but the books to protect them, the group must figure out how to survive the night while trapped with a murderer.
One night locked in the library. What could go wrong?
This is a selection of our current I Read Canadian titles. To find other titles or authors, or just to browse, please use the search box.
