6 Canadian Page-turners For Fall

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If you’re looking for a fall reading list, Canadian literature has plenty to offer. Here, six homegrown page-turners to look out for this season.

After a summer of beach reads, this seasonal six-pack allows readers to add a little Canada 150 spirit to their bookshelves.

Acclaimed Canadian music historian Nicholas Jennings presents the definitive biography of a national musical treasure with Lightfoot, crafting a portrait of Gordon Lightfoot’s life through interviews with friends, musicians and the singer himself.

Meanwhile, former Walrus fiction editor Nick Mount chronicles the stories and scribes who fuelled the rise of Canadian literature in the last century, from Atwood to Richler, in Arrival: The Story of CanLit.

Speaking of CanLit, three huge fiction titles arrive this month: That’s My Baby, Frances Itani’s story of identity and belonging amid the ravages of the Second World War that serves as a sequel to her Giller-nominated novel Tell; Linda Spalding’s A Reckoning, a Civil War-era slavery tale of freedom and familial strife that echoes her 2012 Governor General’s Literary Award-winning The Purchase; and Wayne Johnston’s First Snow, Last Light, about a Newfoundland teen’s life and struggles following the disappearance of his family, which features the return of the memorable Sheilagh Fielding, who first appeared in his hugely popular The Colony of Unrequited Dreams.

To cap the six-pack, Moncton-born cartoonist Michael de Adder offers an illustrated exploration of the nation itself in You Might Be From Canada If….

A version of this article appeared in the October 2017 issue with the headline, “Canadian Six-pack,” p. 18.