Five More Canadian Novels I’ve Read

As I mentioned in my first post on this theme, British bookshops are awash with fiction from the US, not so much from its neighbour. A shame, as I often enjoy Canadian writing when I do come across it. Here are five more favourites, four with links to my reviews, beginning with one by an author who may be familiar to UK readers already.

Three narrative strands run through Mary Lawson’s A Town Called Solace whose eponymous town is in the isolated Canadian north. Eight-year-old Clara is fretting about her teenage sister who’s taken off without telling her parents where she’s going. Her neighbour, Mrs Orchard, who has a great affection for the little girl, has been taken to hospital, asking Clara to look after her beloved cat. Then a stranger turns up, walking around Mrs Orchard’s house as if he owns it. Liam is fleeing a broken marriage, puzzled at the generous gift of a house, a generosity which leads back to a past when he meant a great deal to the Orchards and they to him. There’s much sadness and more than a little darkness in this enjoyable, immersive novel but it left me feeling hopeful for these characters I’d come to care for.

Right from the start of Sarah Leipciger’s debut, The Mountain Can Wait, we know that Curtis Berry has knocked down a young woman, leaving her for dead at the side of the road. From there Leipciger switches her focus to Tom who raised Curtis and his younger sister alone. Tom runs a tree planting company, camping in the Canadian backwoods with his team where they spend a month or so working and, occasionally, playing hard. When he’s visited by a detective at the camp, he knows he must track his son down, a trail which leads him to his mother-in-law last seen a decade ago. Leipciger’s writing has a stripped-down, spare simplicity which conveys so much in a single phrase, and the sense of place is strikingly vivid. In just a few words she made me feel I was striding around the Canadian bush.

The female friendship theme drew me to Laurie Petrou’s Stargazer. Set in the ‘90s, it follows Aurelle and Diana who become inseparable after Diana’s bullying brother drowns, choosing to study at the university attended by Aurelle’s famous mother. Diana grew up watching the never-ending house party hosted by fashion designer Marianne Taylor, much loved by rave culture after a picture of Aurelle wearing one of her designs was picked up by the press. They set up house together: Diana, happy to dip into student life but remaining apart, while Aurelle relishes her apparent anonymity. Lots of foreshadowing so we know something will go wrong but what interested me was the exploration of art, fame, sibling relationships and friendship which give the novel heft while keeping up a page-turning pace.

Annabel Lyon’s Consent brings two very different women together: Sara watched her mother coping with the special needs of her sister, struggling after their father died suddenly, while Saskia grew up in the shadow of her beautiful, bipolar twin. When, Saskia discovers the provocative text which precipitated her twin’s accident, she begins to investigate who sent it leading her to Sara, both struggling with loss, grief and self-blame. Lyon’s novel is a sophisticated, thought-provoking exploration of the meaning of consent wrapped up in a smart piece of suspenseful storytelling.

Entirely different from the preceding four, Fugitive Pieces author Anne Michaels’s Held is her third novel making three in almost three decades, an indication of the care and thought with which she approaches her craft. It opens with a wounded man, slipping in and out of consciousness on a battlefield in France in 1917, and ends in the Gulf of Finland where a spark of attraction is both made and remembered. Made up of a series of gorgeously poetic vignettes unfolding a family’s history over more than a century, Michaels’s narrative explores themes of war, love, loss, memory and connection. An extraordinary piece of fiction, and a hugely affecting one, it demands a great deal of thought and concentration from its readers but more than repays them.

Any novels by Canadian writers you’d particularly recommend, preferably available in the UK?

If you’d like to explore more posts like this, you can find them here. My first five Canadian novels are here.