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 favourite recent Canadian books.
52 Ways to Reconcile
- David A Robertson 
Hardcover
$25.00
Reader Reward Price: $22.50
From bestselling author of the Misewa Saga series David A. Robertson, this is the essential guide for all Canadians to understand how small and attainable acts towards reconciliation can make an enormous difference in our collective efforts to build a reconciled country.
52 Ways to Reconcile is an accessible, friendly guide for non-Indigenous people eager to learn, or Indigenous people eager to do more in our collective effort towards reconciliation, as people, and as a country. As much as non-Indigenous people want to walk the path of reconciliation, they often aren't quite sure what to do, and they're afraid of making mistakes. This book is the answer and the long overdue guide.
The idea of this book is simple: 52 small acts of reconciliation to consider, one per week, for an entire year. They're all doable, and they're all meaningful. All 52 steps take readers in the right direction, towards a healthier relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people and a time when we are past trauma. By following these steps, we can live in stronger and healthier communities equally, and respectfully, together.
Austen at Sea
- Natalie Jenner
Trade paperback
$25.99
Reader Reward Price: $23.39
Two pairs of siblings, devotees of Jane Austen, find their lives transformed by a visit to England and Sir Francis Austen, her last surviving brother and keeper of a long-suppressed, secret legacy.
In Boston, 1865, Charlotte and Henrietta Stevenson, daughters of a Massachusetts Supreme Court Justice, have accomplished as much as women are allowed in those days. Chafing against those restrictions and inspired by the works of Jane Austen, they start a secret correspondence with Sir Francis Austen, her last surviving brother, now in his nineties. He sends them an original letter from his sister and invites them to come visit him in England.
In Philadelphia, Nicholas & Haslett Nelson--bachelor brothers, veterans of the recent Civil War, and rare book dealers--are also in correspondence with Sir Francis Austen, who lures them, too, to England, with the promise of a never-before-seen, rare Austen artifact to be evaluated.
The Stevenson sisters sneak away without a chaperone to sail to England. On their ship are the Nelson brothers, writer Louisa May Alcott, Sara-Beth Gleason--wealthy daughter of a Pennsylvania state senator with her eye on the Nelsons--and, a would-be last-minute chaperone to the Stevenson sisters, Justice Thomas Nash.
It's a voyage and trip that will dramatically change each of their lives in ways that are unforeseen, with the transformative spirit of the love of literature and that of Jane Austen herself.
The Book of Records
- Madeleine Thien
Hardcover
$36.95
Reader Reward Price: $33.26
Named a 2025 Most Anticipated Release by Toronto Star o Literary Hub o Esquire o The Washington Post o 49th Shelf o She Does the City
The sublime, long-awaited, major new novel from the beloved author of the Governor General's Literary Award-winning, Booker Prize-shortlisted bestseller Do Not Say We Have Nothing.
The Book of Records opens inside "The Sea," a mysterious shape-shifting enclave, a staging-post for waves of migrants coming and going, a building made of time where pasts and futures collide. Here, a girl named Lina cares for her ailing father.
Having arrived carrying her few possessions by hand, Lina grows up with only three books to read--a trio taken from a grand 90-volume series about the lives of famous "voyagers" throughout history. As she goes about daily life in the building, finding food and necessities for herself and her father, she befriends three eccentric neighbours, each with a story to share. There's Bento, an ex-communicated Jewish scholar from seventeenth-century Amsterdam (who resembles voyager Baruch Spinoza in one of Lina's books); Blucher, a philosopher from 1930s Germany who escaped Nazi persecution (and whose life mirrors that of Hannah Arendt, from another of Lina's books); and Jupiter, a brilliant but impoverished poet of Tang Dynasty China (whose story shadows that of voyager Du Fu). As Lina grows up, she spends hours with these three, listening to their fascinating tales. But it is only when her father, his strength fading, reveals how he and Lina came to seek refuge in The Sea that she begins to understand her own story, and the acts of love and betrayal shaping her life.
Exquisitely written with extraordinary subtlety of thought, The Book of Records leaps across centuries as if eras were separated by only a door. It holds a mirror to the role of fate, shows how a political moment may determine the course of an individual's life, and suggests the longings and consolations of a voyaging mind and heart. This is Madeleine Thien at her most exciting, sublime and engaging.
Bones of a Giant
- Brian Thomas Isaac
Hardcover
$35.00
Reader Reward Price: $31.50
From the award-winning, bestselling author of All the Quiet Places, comes Brian Thomas Isaac's highly anticipated, haunting and tender return to the Okanagan Indian Reserve and a teenager's struggle to become a man in a world of racism and hardship.
Summer, 1968. For the first time since his big brother, Eddie, disappeared two years earlier--either a runaway or dead by his own hand--sixteen-year-old Lewis Toma has shaken off some of his grief. His mother, Grace, and her friend Isabel have gone south to the United States to pack fruit to earn the cash Grace needs to put a bathroom and running water into the three-room shack they share on the reserve, leaving Lewis to spend the summer with his cousins, his Uncle Ned and his Aunt Jean in the new house they've built on their farm along the Salmon River. Their warm family life is almost enough to counter the pressures he feels as a boy trying to become a man in a place where responsible adult men like his uncle are largely absent, broken by residential school and racism. Everywhere he looks, women are left to carry the load, sometimes with kindness, but often with the bitterness, anger and ferocity of his own mother, who kicked Lewis's lowlife father, Jimmy, to the curb long ago.
Lewis has vowed never to be like his father--but an encounter with a predatory older woman tests him and he suffers the consequences. Worse, his dad is back in town and scheming on how to use the Indian Act to steal the land Lewis and his mom have been living on. And then, at summer's end, more shocking revelations shake the family, unleashing a deadly force of anger and frustration.
With so many traps laid around him, how will Lewis find a path to a different future?
The Boy Who Was Saved by Jazz
- Tom Bentley-Fisher
Trade paperback
$24.95
Reader Reward Price: $22.46
Robert lost his father before he'd even been born, and was quickly abandoned by his young mother to be raised by his grandparents in small-town Saskatchewan. In another sense, though, Robert never lost his father, whose ghostly presence lingers in the young boy's life over the years by means of spectral "advice letters" on how to be a man.
When Robert finds an old pump organ in a derelict farmhouse, he discovers a deep love of and talent for performing music. He also begins to discover secrets from his past, including his grandfather's Communist ties, and the familial cover-up of his father's sudden death. Along the way, Robert embraces his budding bisexuality, discovers his Métis identity and harnesses the power of his wild imagination.
Recalling the work of Jamie Fitzpatrick and Greg Rhyno, The Boy Who Was Saved By Jazz is a coming-of-age story and meditation on belonging.
The Butcher's Daughter
- ,
Hardcover
$36.95
Reader Reward Price: $33.26
The story of the vengeful barber Sweeney Todd has gripped fans across literary, stage, and screen renditions--but little has been told of Mrs. Lovett, Todd's partner in crime. Until now.
Enclosed herewith: a bloodcurdling correspondence of horror and intrigue, based on the original Victorian penny dreadful that started it all.
"Your fingers may bleed with paper cuts as you tear through The Butcher's Daughter . . . I am spellbound."--Gregory Maguire, author of Wicked
London, 1887: At the abandoned apartment of a missing young woman, a dossier of evidence is collected, ordered chronologically, and sent to the Chief Inspector of the London Metropolitan Police. It contains a frightening correspondence between an inquisitive journalist, Miss Emily Gibson, and the woman Gibson thinks may be the infamous Mrs. Lovett--Sweeney Todd's accomplice, "a wicked woman" who baked men into pies and sold them in her pie shop on Fleet Street. The talk of London Town--even decades after her horrendous misdeeds.
As the woman relays the harrowing account of her life in the unruly and perilous streets of Victorian London, her missives unlock an intricate mystery that brings Miss Gibson closer to the truth, even as that truth may cost her everything. A hair-raising and breathtaking novel for fans of Sarah Waters and Gregory Maguire, The Butcher's Daughter is an irresistible literary thriller that draws richly from historical sources and shines new light on the woman behind the counter of the most disreputable pie shop ever known.
Contemplation of a Crime
- Susan Juby
Trade paperback
$24.99
Reader Reward Price: $22.49
Buddhist butler and reluctant investigator Helen Thorpe bands together with her fellow butler-school graduates to rescue her very wealthy employer and his son in this new mystery by bestselling author Susan Juby
Butler Helen Thorpe is not one to judge, but the participants in Close Encounters for Global Healing are astonishingly unpleasant.
The five-day program brings together people from across the political spectrum with the goal of helping them bridge their ideological and personal differences. Helen and her employer, Mr. Levine, have come to Side Island to assist David, his youngest son, who is facilitating the course. The motley assortment of participants includes a burned-out environmental activist, an internet troll, a clued-out consumerist, an alleged white nationalist, and a man who was arrested at the Freedom Convoy in Ottawa. No one seems interested in a civil conversation, much less global healing, and each person has shown up with their own secret agenda.
No rapprochement between the warring--or at least endlessly bickering--parties seems possible. But when something deadly happens, they must learn to work together. First, however, they must figure out who among them can be trusted.
A Curse Carved in Bone
- Danielle L Jensen
Hardcover
$42.00
Reader Reward Price: $37.80
A shield maiden fights to break the shackles of prophecy--and to overcome the betrayal of the man who broke her heart--in this searing conclusion to the Norse-inspired fantasy romance duology that began with the bestselling A Fate Inked in Blood.
The stunning first edition hardcover will feature foil page edges, a custom-stamped case, and a premium dust jacket!
The secret of her divine heritage revealed, Freya finds herself on a path that will see thousands of lives lost to the magic in her blood. Desperate to avoid this dark fate, she risks an alliance with Skaland's greatest enemy to seek answers from the seer who foretold her future--the same seer who sent Bjorn to kill her.
While Freya still seethes with rage over Bjorn's betrayal, the blood oaths that bind her demand that she keep him close as she hunts for a way to avert the looming war. Her magic draws her to the front lines of an old enmity, embroiling her with Nordeland's Unfated--children of the gods who serve the king she was raised to fear. The same king who, unlike Bjorn, is now willing to fight at her back. For despite the desire that burns hot between Bjorn and Freya, his growing distrust of her chosen path threatens to drag them further apart.
As war approaches, gods and mortals must choose their weapons. Yet the fiercest battle will be the one Freya wages within herself. With the magic of two goddesses burning in her veins, she must weave the threads of destiny to decide her own fate: Will she be the shield that protects her people or the curse that destroys them?
Founding Folks
- Kevin Nikkel
Trade paperback
$34.95
Reader Reward Price: $31.46
The story of the Winnipeg Folk Festival, from the folks who were there
Every July since 1974, Manitoba's Birds Hill Provincial Park has been home to one of Canada's most vibrant and storied celebrations of folk music-the Winnipeg Folk Festival. Founding Folks tells the festival's origin story, from founder Mitch Podolak's unlikely dream of bringing folk music to prairie stages to how it became one of the most influential Folk Festivals in North America. Through conversations with staff, volunteers, and musicians-including Bruce Cockburn, Tom Jackson, and David Amram-filmmaker Kevin Nikkel offers a nuanced look at community building, explores the relationships between politics and culture, and provides fascinating insight into the lifelong friendships that developed among some of folk music's most defining figures.
Brought to life by more than ninety photographs, this book is a testament to the vitality of prairie arts and culture. Founding Folks captures the spirit and enthusiasm of those early festival days and preserves this legacy for festival goers, students of culture and history, music enthusiasts, and folkies everywhere.
Horsefly
- Mireille Gagné , Pablo Strauss
Trade paperback
$24.95
Reader Reward Price: $22.46
A chilling tale about what happens when we mess with nature.
In 1942, a young entomologist, Thomas, is sent to a remote island to work on biological weapons for the Allied military. The scientists live like prisoners while they produce anthrax and look for the perfect virus carrier among the island's many insects.
Sixty years later, in the same region of Quebec, a heat wave unleashes swarms of horseflies while humans fall prey to strange flights of rage. Theodore is living a simple life, working double shifts and drinking to forget, when a horsefly bite stirs him from his apathy. He impulsively kidnaps his grandfather, whose dementia has him living in the past on Grosse Île.
The horseflies, meanwhile, know a few secrets...
Loosely based on historical fact, Horsefly is a terrifying tale about the ways in which we try to dominate nature, and how nature will, inevitably, wreak retribution upon us.
Julie Chan Is Dead
- Liann Zhang
Trade paperback
$24.99
Reader Reward Price: $22.49
In this razor-sharp, diabolical debut thriller, a young woman steps into her deceased twin's influencer life, only to discover dark secrets hidden behind her social media façade.
Julie Chan has nothing. Her twin sister has everything. Except a pulse.
Julie Chan, a supermarket cashier with nothing to lose, finds herself thrust into the glamorous yet perilous world of her late twin sister, Chloe VanHuusen, a popular influencer. Separated at a young age, the identical twins were polar opposites and rarely spoke, except for one viral video that Chloe initiated (Finding My Long-Lost Twin And Buying Her A House #EMOTIONAL). When Julie discovers Chloe's lifeless body under mysterious circumstances, she seizes the chance to live the life she's always envied.
Transforming into Chloe is easier than expected. Julie effortlessly adopts Chloe's luxurious influencer life, complete with designer clothes, a meticulous skincare routine, and millions of adoring followers. However, Julie soon realizes that Chloe's seemingly picture-perfect life was anything but.
Haunted by Chloe's untimely death and struggling to fit into the privileged influencer circle, Julie faces mounting challenges during a weeklong island retreat with Chloe's exclusive group of influencer friends. As events spiral out of control, Julie uncovers the sinister forces that may have led to her sister's demise and realizes she might be the next target.
Living Expenses
- Teri Vlassopoulos
Trade paperback
$24.95
Reader Reward Price: $22.46
As the children to a single mother who immigrated from the Philippines, Laura and Claire have always been exceptionally close. Told from the perspective of Laura, Living Expenses is about a point of divergence in the sisters' lives: Claire has moved to San Francisco for a startup job in Silicon Valley while Laura and her husband, Joe, remain in Toronto and decide to start a family. Laura quickly encounters issues and begins the slow process of fertility treatments. Meanwhile, Claire gets involved in a venture that taps into the fertility industry. Living Expenses interrogates the strain that can accompany even the strongest of relationships, and captures the inevitable creep of technology into all facets of its characters' lives, from communication to reproduction.
Other Worlds
- Andre Alexis
Trade paperback
$24.95
Reader Reward Price: $22.46
The award-winning author of Fifteen Dogs conjures up worlds - real, invented, uncanny - in this ingenious, electrifying collection.
A Trinidadian Obeah man finds himself reborn, a hundred years after his death, in the body of a Canadian child. A writer takes up a seasonal job as the caretaker of a set of mysterious large sacks hanging from the rafters of the houses in a small town. A woman starts a relationship with the famous artist who painted portraits of her mother. The contents of a sealed envelope upend a woman's understanding about a tragic crime she committed at the age of six.
In this dazzling collection of stories, André Alexis draws fresh connections between worlds: the ones we occupy, the ones we imagine, and the ones that preceded our own. He introduces us to characters during moments of profound puzzlement, and transports us from 19th century Trinidad and Tobago to small-town Ontario, from Amherst, Massachusetts to contemporary Toronto.
These captivating stories reveal flashes of reckoning, defeat, despair, alienation, and understanding, all the while playfully using a multitude of literary genres, including gothic horror and isekai, and referencing works from greats like Jane Austen, Jonathan Swift, Yasunari Kawabata, Witold Gombrowicz, and Tomasso Landolfi.
Masterfully crafted, blending poignant philosophical inquiry and wry humour tinged with the absurd, here are worlds refracted and reflected back to us with pristine clarity and stunning emotional resonance as only André Alexis can.
Palm Meridian
- Grace Flahive
Trade paperback
$24.99
Reader Reward Price: $22.49
"A riotous novel about a farewell party that celebrates all of life's emotions--big and small--while marking the arrival of an exciting new voice in fiction." --Steven Rowley, New York Times bestselling author of The Celebrants
A rollicking, big-hearted story of long-lost love, friendship, and a life well-lived, set at a Florida retirement resort for queer women, on the last day of resident Hannah Cardin's life--perfect for readers of Less and The Wedding People.
It's 2067 and Florida is partially underwater, but even that can't bring down the residents of Palm Meridian Retirement Resort, a utopian home for queer women who want to revel in their twilight years. Inside, Hula-Hoopers shimmy across the grass, fiercely competitive book clubs nearly come to blows, and the roller-ski team races up and down the winding paths. Everywhere you look, these women are living large.
Hannah Cardin has spent ten happy years under these tropical, technicolor skies, but after receiving a terminal cancer diagnosis, she has decided that tomorrow morning she will close her eyes for the very last time. Tonight, however, Hannah and her raucous band of friends are throwing one hell of an end-of-life party. And with less than twenty-four hours left, Hannah is holding out for one final, impossible thing...
Amongst the guest list is Sophie, the love of Hannah's life. They haven't spoken since their devastating breakup over forty years ago, but today, Hannah is hoping for the chance to give her greatest love one last try.
As Hannah anxiously awaits Sophie's arrival, her mind casts back over the highs and lows of her kaleidoscopic life. But when a shocking secret from the past is revealed, Hannah must reconsider if she can say goodbye after all.
Spanning the course of a single day and seventy-odd years, and bursting with irresistible hope, humor, and wisdom, this one-of-a-kind novel celebrates the unexpected moments that make us feel the most alive.
Soft as Bones
- Chyana Marie Sage
Trade paperback
$26.99
Reader Reward Price: $24.29
A poetic memoir as intricately woven as a dreamcatcher about overcoming the pain of generational trauma with the power of traditional healing
In candid, incisive, and delicate prose, Chyana Marie Sage shares the pain of growing up with her father, a crack dealer who went to prison for molesting her older sister. In revisiting her family's history, Chyana examines the legacy of generational abuse, which began with her father's father, who was forcibly removed from his family by the residential schools and Sixties Scoop programs. Yet hers is also a story of hope, as it was the traditions of her people that saved her life, healing one small piece in the mosaic that makes up the dark past of colonialism shared by Indigenous people throughout Turtle Island.
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.
