Skip to content
Account Login Winnipeg Toll-Free: 1-800-561-1833 SK Toll-Free: 1-877-506-7456 Contact & Locations

Sort by

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.

The Whispers

- Ashley Audrain

Trade paperback $24.95
Reader Reward Price: $22.46

INSTANT #1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER

"Expertly, subtly and powerfully rendered. . . . [The Whispers] delivers a sucker-punch ending you'll have to read twice to believe."--The New York Times Book Review

"[An] electrifying . . . razor-sharp page-turner." --Carley Fortune, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Every Summer After


On Harlow Street, the well-to-do neighbor­hood couples and their children gather for a barbecue as the summer winds down. Everything is fabulous until Whitney, the picture-perfect hostess, explodes in fury because her son disobeys her. Everyone at the party hears her exquisite veneer crack--loud and clear. Before long, that same young boy falls from his bedside window in the middle of the night. And then his mother can only sit by her son's hospital bed, where his life hangs in the balance.

Over the course of a tense three days, the women of the neighborhood grapple with what led to that terrible night. People-pleasing Blair, Whitney's best friend, suspects something isn't as it seems. Rebecca, the ER doctor who helps treat Whit­ney's son, has struggled to have a child of her own. And the all-knowing Mara, the older woman next door, watches everyone's world unravel from her front porch.

Exploring envy, women's friendships, desire, and the intuitions that we silence, The Whispers is a chilling novel that marks Ashley Audrain as a major fiction talent.

Six Ostriches

- Philipp Schott

Trade paperback $24.95
Reader Reward Price: $22.46



"Combines the soothing sleuthing of Murder, She Wrote with the humble charm of All Creatures Great and Small." -- Publishers Weekly STARRED review

For readers of The Thursday Murder Club comes a lighthearted mystery with an incredible sense of place

It's springtime in rural Manitoba, and the snow has finally left the exotic animal farm when an ostrich finds and swallows a shiny object. (Because this is what ostriches do.) Cue veterinarian and amateur sleuth Dr. Peter Bannerman, who surgically removes the object, which looks like an ancient Viking artifact. Soon after, people around are horrified by a series of animal mutilations. This sets Peter, and his talented sniffer dog, Pippin, on the hunt for answers. Peter begins to suspect a link between the Viking artifact, the mutilations, and a shadowy group of white supremacists on the internet.

Before long Peter and Pippin are in over their heads, and the only way for them to get out alive will be to unmask the mastermind before they end up among their victims.

Agent of Change

- Huda Mukbil

Hardcover $34.95
Reader Reward Price: $31.46

In Agent of Change Huda Mukbil takes us behind the curtain of a leading spy agency during a fraught time, recounting her experiences as an intelligence officer for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. Mukbil was the first Black Arab-Canadian Muslim woman to join CSIS and was at the forefront of the fight against terrorism after 9/11. Mukbil's mastery of four languages quickly made her a counterterrorism expert and a uniquely valuable asset to the organization. But as she worked with colleagues to confront new international threats, she also struggled for acceptance and recognition at the agency. Following the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the rise of homegrown extremism, Mukbil was framed as an inside threat. Determined to prove her loyalty, while equally concerned about the surveillance and profiling of Muslims and revelations of Western agencies' torture and torture by proxy, Mukbil started to question CSIS's fluctuating ethical stance in relation to its mandate. Her stellar work on a secondment to MI5, the British Security Service, earned commendation; this shielded her, but only temporarily, from the hostile workplace culture at CSIS. Ultimately, Mukbil and a group of colleagues went public about the pervasive institutional discrimination undermining CSIS and national security from within.Mukbil's expertise in international security and her commitment to workplace transparency drove important changes at CSIS. Dazzlingly written, her account is an eye-opener for anyone wanting to understand how racism, misogyny, and Islamophobia undermine not only individuals, but institutions and the national interest - and how addressing this openly can tackle populism and misinformation.

Carving Space

- Jordan Abel , Carleigh Baker, Madeleine Reddon

Trade paperback $24.95
Reader Reward Price: $22.46

To celebrate the fifth anniversary of the Indigenous Voices Awards, an anthology consisting of selected works by finalists over the past five years, edited by Jordan Abel, Carleigh Baker, and Madeleine Reddon.

Established in 2017, the Indigenous Voices Awards honour the sovereignty of Indigenous creative voices and nurture the work of emerging Indigenous writers in lands claimed by Canada.

Through generous support from hundreds of Canadians and organizations such as Penguin Random House Canada, Scholastic Canada, Douglas & McIntyre, Pamela Dillon and Family Gift Fund, the awards have ushered in a new and dynamic generation of Indigenous writers. Past IVAs recipients include Billy-Ray Belcourt and Tanya Tagaq. The IVAs also promote the works of unpublished writers, helping to launch the careers of Smokii Sumac, Cody Caetano, and Samantha Martin-Bird. 

This anthology gathers together a selection of the finalists over the past five years, highlighting some of the most pathbreaking Indigenous writing across poetry, prose, and theatre in English, French, and Indigenous languages. Curated by award-winning and critically acclaimed writers Jordan Abel (Nisga'a) and Carleigh Baker (Métis), and scholar Madeleine Reddon (Métis), this anthology is a celebration of Indigenous storytelling that both introduces readers to emerging luminaries and returns them to treasured favourites.

The Comeback

- Lily Chu

Trade paperback $25.99
Reader Reward Price: $23.39

For fans of The People We Meet on Vacation and everything K-Pop comes a hilarious and thoughtful story of fame, family, and love.

"Hilarious and relatable." --Talia Hibbert, USA Today bestselling author for The Stand-In

Ariadne Hui thrives on routine. So what if everything in her life is planned down to the minute: that's the way she likes it. If she's going to make partner in Toronto's most prestigious law firm, she needs to stay focused at all times.

But when she comes home after yet another soul-sucking day to find an unfamiliar, gorgeous man camped out in her living room, focus is the last thing on her mind. Especially when her roommate explains this is Choi Jihoon, her cousin freshly arrived from Seoul to mend a broken heart. He just needs a few weeks to rest and heal; Ari will barely even know he's there. (Yeah, right.)

Jihoon is kindness and chaos personified, and it isn't long before she's falling, hard. But when one wrong step leads to a shocking truth, Ari finds herself thrust onto the world stage: not as the competent, steely lawyer she's fought so hard to become, but as the mystery woman on the arm of a man the entire world claims to know. Now with her heart, her future, and her sense of self on the line, Ari will have to cut through all the pretty lies to find the truth of her relationship...and discover the Ariadne Hui she's finally ready to be.

WHO IS ARIADNE HUI?Laser-focused lawyer climbing the corporate ladder"Perfect" daughter living her father's dreamShocking love interest of South Korea's hottest star

Cook It Wild

- Chris Nuttall-Smith

Hardcover $40.00
Reader Reward Price: $36.00

INSTANT GLOBE AND MAIL AND TORONTO STAR BESTSELLER o AN EPICURIOUS BEST COOKBOOK OF THE YEAR

Say goodbye to ho-hum canned beans and freeze-dried camping meals. With prep-ahead recipes and field-tested advice, flavor-packed dishes suchas herby lemon chicken and fire-baked sticky buns become deliciously doable and fuss-free--whether you're in the wilderness or your own backyard.


In this game-changing camping cookbook, food writer and outdoorsman Chris Nuttall-Smith introduces an ingenious prep-ahead approach that gets most (or even all) of the cooking done before a trip ever begins. Each recipe is divided into "at home" and "at camp" sections, so on your trip, many recipes have you simply drop fully prepped ingredients into a pot or onto a grill. Just like that, you'll be dining on showstopping Sweet-Tangy Lemon Ribs or Sizzling Cumin Lamb Kebabs paired with Puff-and-Serve Chapati.

Plus, learn about the best-traveling cheeses, how to chill drinks when you don't have ice, how to pick (and use) the right camp stove, and how to make great coffee outdoors! Cook It Wild proves that cooks and campers of every level can have the most spectacular campfire meals.

A Grandmother Begins the Story

- Michelle Porter

Hardcover $34.95
Reader Reward Price: $31.46

National Bestseller
Finalist for the 2023 Writers' Trust Atwood Gibson Fiction Prize


Five generations of Métis women argue, dance, struggle, laugh, love, and tell the stories that will sing their family, and perhaps the land itself, into healing in this brilliantly original debut novel.


Carter is a young mother, recently separated. She is curious, angry, and on a quest to find out what the heritage she only learned of in her teens truly means.

Allie is trying to make up for the lost years with her first born, and to protect Carter from the hurt she herself suffered from her own mother.

Lucie wants the granddaughter she's never met to help her join her ancestors in the Afterlife.

Geneviève is determined to conquer her demons before the fire inside burns her up, with the help of the sister she lost but has never been without.

And Mamé, in the Afterlife, knows that all their stories began with her; she must find a way to loose herself from the last threads that keep her tethered to the living, just as they must find their own paths forward.

This extraordinary novel, told by a chorus of vividly realized, funny, wise, confused, struggling characters--including descendants of the bison that once freely roamed the land--heralds the arrival of a stunning new voice in literary fiction.

Hey, Good Luck Out There

- Georgia Toews

Trade paperback $21.00
Reader Reward Price: $18.90

Subversive, captivating and vividly attuned to both the extraordinary and the mundane, Georgia Toews' debut novel Hey, Good Luck Out There is a furious and hilarious journey through the relentless, soul-baring world of addiction and recovery.

After an amazingly unpleasant pizza party intervention, our twenty-two-year-old narrator checks into a women's rehab facility, confined "for her own safety" without meaningful contact with the outside world. For escape, she and her fellow patients have only stilted phone calls with their disappointed and concerned parents, daily meetings in the form of inspirational speeches from wealthy ex-alcoholics and lifestyle gurus, visits to the doctor, and clandestine trips to a dingy internet cafe. For our narrator, a neon-pink journal gifted by her grandmother with gold embossed letters on the front--"Let Them Eat Cake!"--is her only comfort amid an endless carousel of strangeness and unease.
 
When she is discharged from rehab after thirty punishing days, returned to Toronto's streets without resources, a job, or an apartment, and tasked with staying clean despite a seemingly bottomless urge to give up, the book asks: What next? What happens in the aftermath of your lowest low? Alone, and at war with an intrusive inner creature, at last she begins the process of making a home for herself in the world.
 
Hey, Good Luck Out There introduces a dynamic new voice in fiction: Georgia Toews is at once unguardedly truthful, gritty, and darkly funny, with a sardonic, wholly original sense of the absurd.

A History of Burning

- Janika Oza

Hardcover $36.00
Reader Reward Price: $32.40

INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER
Winner of the 2024 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature
Finalist for the 2023 Governor General's Award for Fiction
Longlisted for the 2024 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction

Named a Best Book of 2023 by the New York Times, The New Yorker, the Globe and Mail, CBC Books, Kobo Canada, and 49th Shelf
Longlisted for the 2024 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction

Four generations. Three sisters. One impossible choice. A profoundly moving debut novel spanning India, Uganda, England, and Canada, about how one act of survival reverberates across generations of a family and their search for a place of their own. Named a New York Times Book Review Editors' Pick, and a most anticipated book of 2023 by the Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail, OprahDaily, and Goodreads.


India, 1898. Pirbhai is the thirteen-year-old breadwinner for his family when he steps into a dhow on the promise of work, only to be taken across the ocean to labour on the East African Railway for the British. With no money or voice but a strong will to survive, he makes an impossible choice that will haunt him for the rest of his days and reverberate across generations.

Pirbhai's children go on to thrive in Uganda during the waning days of British colonial rule. As the country moves towards independence and military dictatorship, Pirbhai's granddaughters--sisters Latika, Mayuri, and Kiya--come of age in a divided nation, each forging her own path for the future. Latika is an aspiring journalist with a fierce determination to fight for what she believes in. Mayuri's ambitions will take her farther away from her family than she ever imagined. And fearless Kiya will have to bear the weight of their secrets.

Forced to flee Uganda during Idi Amin's brutal expulsion of South Asians in 1972, the family must start their lives over again in Toronto. Then one day news arrives that makes each generation question how far they are willing to go, and who they are willing to defy, to secure a place of their own in the world. 

A masterful and breathtakingly intimate saga of colonialism and exile, complicity and resistance, A History of Burning is a radiant debut about the stories our families choose to share--and those that remain unspoken.

Hold Your Tongue

- Matthew Ttreault

Trade paperback $22.95
Reader Reward Price: $20.66

Upon learning his great-uncle Alfred has suffered a stroke, Richard sets out for Ste. Anne, in southeastern Manitoba, to find his father and tell him the news. Waylaid by memories of his stalled romance, tales of run-ins with local Mennonites, his job working a honey wagon, and struck by visions of Métis history and secrets of his family's past, Richard confronts his desires to leave town, even as he learns to embrace his heritage.

Leaving Wisdom

- Sharon Butala

Trade paperback $24.95
Reader Reward Price: $22.46

Sharon Butala's new novel begins with the wrong kind of bang when retiring social worker Judith falls on the ice on the way to her retirement party. The debilitating concussion that follows seems to shake loose a confusing whirl of memories.

Judith is a mother of four, and her relationships with her daughters are complicated. They all seem to have men trouble, except for the wild daughter who seems to have settled down, inexplicably to Judith, in Jerusalem. With her ears still ringing and her strength compromised by a shaky recovery, Judith leaves Calgary and, to everyone's bewilderment, moves back to the town near the family farm. In Wisdom, Saskatchewan, she confronts many unanswered questions: Why was her father, a World War Two vet, so troubled? What are her brother and sister hiding from her? As she pursues answers to unsolved mysteries in her own life, more complicated and wider ranging questions arise.

Living in a small town is a shock after the anonymity of a big city. Judith finds herself exposed to watchful neighbours, and she is watchful in turn, seeing things that are mystifying at first -- and then alarming. Small town bigotry and what looks like a serious crime unfolding in the house next door make her return even more difficult -- what is she doing here? Does she have enough wisdom to unravel her past? Does she have a future in a place where she is not exactly welcome?

This thought-provoking and very readable tale shows not only the suffering that comes from family secrets, but also unfolds one woman?s late life awakening to the complex shadows cast by World War Two and the Holocaust.

Old Keyam and Black Hawk

- Canon Edward Ahenakew , Heather Hodgson

Trade paperback $26.95
Reader Reward Price: $24.26



In a monumental moment in literary history, the Collected Works of Canon Edward Ahenakew (vol. 1) brings together two semi-autobiographical stories, Old Keyam and the never-before-published Black Hawk.

Written during the early twentieth century, Old Keyam and Black Hawk are semi-autobiographical stories told in the charming, insightful voice of Canon Edward Ahenakew. Through the fictional character Old Keyam, Ahenakew protests against the colonial settler's attempts to force the Cree peoples into "civilization." Despite the pained and angry voice of Old Keyam, the story is also at once humorous and satirical.

Following Old Keyam is the never-before-published Black Hawk. It tells the story of a young Cree man who, despite being a Christian, experiences discrimination as he navigates the changing society in Canada at the start of the 20th century, including the pass system and boarding school (residential school). Readers will discover a beautiful, charming love story as Black Hawk navigates the joy and pain of a budding romance.

 

Pebble & Dove

- Amy Jones

Trade paperback $24.95
Reader Reward Price: $22.46

Named a Best Book of the Year So Far by Audible.ca. In the tradition of Karen Russell's Swamplandia!, a once-famous but now-abandoned aquarium-in-a-ship in Florida is the captivating backdrop for a novel of family secrets and dysfunction, and the ways in which it can sometimes take an animal to remind us how to be human.

This is the story of a family falling apart, only to be brought back together again by an unlikely champion--a 1,000-pound aquatic mammal named Pebble. 

Lauren's life is a mess. She has a storage unit full of candles she can't sell, a growing mountain of debt, and a teenage daughter, Dove, who barely speaks to her. Then her husband sends her a text that changes everything. Eager to escape her problems, she drives herself and Dove south to her late mother's rundown trailer in Florida. While keeping her eccentric new neighbours at Swaying Palms at bay, Lauren begins to untangle the truth about her estranged mother. How did world-famous portrait photographer Imogen Starr end up at Swaying Palms?And what happened to her fortune and her photographs?

Meanwhile, Dove has secrets of her own. A mysterious photograph leads her to discover the abandoned Flamingo Key Aquarium and Tackle, where she meets Pebble, the world's oldest manatee in captivity. It is Pebble, a former star attraction, and her devoted caretaker, Ray, who will hold the key to helping Lauren and Dove come to terms with Imogen's unexpected legacy. 

Darkly funny and sharply observed, Pebble & Dove is a moving novel about the complicated relationship between mothers and daughters, and learning how to choose between what's worth saving and what needs to be let go.

Reckoning

- Patrick Friesen

Trade paperback $17.95
Reader Reward Price: $16.16


Reckoning is one long poem in search of itself, its own meaning. A synecdoche of verse, segments calling and responding to each other, like jazz musicians riffing back and forth in a late-night smokey speakeasy. Snippets of conversation make it through the air, across the space that seems vast even in its closeness. We are big, we are small, there is eternity in a birdcall. This is end times, yet beginnings surround us. They are there in memory, in grief, in happiness and in song.

Here is a master poet taking stock in later years. Adrift and grounded, lost in memories that are alive in the present and also lost to history, the artist's mind cannot help but speculate and wonder about the navigation of it all. How does one chart the course? How did one chart the course? And what was discovered along the way? Joy, awe, grief, loss, wonder . . . "disappearing into the mind of the dream, / that opening," and now all rolled into one ball of what, wisdom?

"what was my early life, banging away at that padlocked gate?

. . .

is this where

the return begins? starting over in old age, body

falling apart according to plan, and no blossoming

wisdom, kneeling on the muddy riverbank, thirsty

once again for mind,

. . .

and when

the brain falters the stories skew once more into

something unfamiliar, something from long before

you, and those pieces won't be put together again,

not ever, will they?"

What connects us with the past?&nbspMemory and story.&nbspEach fragment a part of the whole. Without it we exist in isolation.&nbspFriesen's deep and careful observations make Reckoning both intensely personal and universal.

To the Bridge

- Yasuko Thanh

Trade paperback $24.95
Reader Reward Price: $22.46

From the bestselling author of Mistakes to Run With, a heartrending tale of a mother hell-bent on saving her family after her daughter's suicide attempt--despite the destruction it might mean for herself.

When Rose's seventeen-year-old daughter, Juliet, attempts suicide, she does everything she can to hold her family together despite the inevitable unraveling that follows. Her husband Syd thinks their daughter is fine, that she's going through a phase, and tells Rose she's overreacting--as do the doctors, the school principal, and even Juliet herself. But Rose knows her daughter better than anyone. Doesn't she?

Rose and Juliet begin to drift apart and then fade into each other until they aren't sure who's saving whom--or if they're saving each other. As Rose struggles to navigate this unknown territory, the family unwittingly makes decisions that suddenly send them all into an escalated tailspin toward disaster.

Capturing the tightly coiled tension of seeing someone on the edge of a bridge about to jump, Yasuko Thanh takes us on a journey into the psyche of a woman grappling to understand why her daughter would want to die, and how to protect her child when she's chosen not to protect herself.

Haunting, emotional, and unforgettable, To the Bridge shows how a bridge is not something to leap from, but something to cross--how a mother and her daughter can find a way to connect, even when there is a river of difference raging between them.

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.

Page: << 3 4 5 6 7 >>