Canadian Literature

[FizbansTalking_Hat]

For those that are unaware of underexposed to the wonders of Canadian Literature, I suggest you try the following books below. They are some of the top books in the Canadian Cannon of Literature and Penguin Canada just released them this past month in nice new covers.

Alice Munro, Timothy Findley, Mordacai Richeler, Robertson Davies. There are countless other Canadian writers who have added to the world of canadian literature but these are some of the best and the most popular, for those wanting to try something different yet still read something considered a classic, check out the list below, cheers.

Modern Classic.ca

New Penguin Classics (Canadian Literature)

Dance of the Happy Shades
Alice Munro

In the stories that make up Dance of the Happy Shades, the deceptive calm of small-town life is brought memorably to the page, revealing the countryside of Southwestern Ontario to be home to as many small sufferings and unanticipated emotions as any place. This is the book that earned Alice Munro a devoted readership and established her as one of Canada's most beloved writers.

Winner of the Governor General's Award for Fiction, Dance of the Happy Shades is Alice Munro's first short story collection.

Lives of Girls and Women
Alice Munro

Lives of Girls and Women is the intensely readable, touching, and very funny story of Del Jordan, a young woman who journeys from the carelessness of childhood through an uneasy adolescence in search of love and sexual experience.

As Del dreams of becoming famous, suffers embarrassment about her mother, endures the humiliation of her body's insistent desires, and tries desperately to fall in love, she grapples with the crises that mark the passage to womanhood.

Famous Last Words
Timothy Findley

In the final days of the Second World War, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley scrawls his desperate account on the walls and ceilings of his ice-cold prison high in the Austrian Alps. Officers of the liberating army discover his frozen, disfigured corpse and his astonishing testament—the sordid truth that he alone possessed. Fascinated but horrified, they learn of a dazzling array of characters caught up in scandal and political corruption. The exiled Duke and Duchess of Windsor, von Ribbentrop, Hitler, Charles Lindbergh, Sir Harry Oakes—all play sinister parts in an elaborate scheme to secure world domination.

The Wars
Timothy Findley

Robert Ross, a sensitive nineteen-year-old Canadian officer, went to war—The War to End All Wars. He found himself in the nightmare world of trench warfare, of mud and smoke, of chlorine gas and rotting corpses. In this world gone mad, Robert Ross performed a last desperate act to declare his commitment to life in the midst of death.

Solomon Gursky Was Here
Mordecai Richler

Moses Berger is very young when he first hears the name that will obsess him and drive him on a quest across Canada and Europe. His life becomes consumed with unravelling the secrets from the startling, almost mythical life of a man and family shrouded in lies.

Ranging from the underworld of nineteenth-century London, through the Franklin expedition to the Arctic, to the Prohibition years on the prairies and the Eastern Townships of Quebec, Solomon Gursky Was Here is a grand, uncommonly rich tale from one of Canada's best storytellers.

Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz
Mordecai Richler

Duddy Kravitz is obsessed with his grandfather's maxim, “A man without land is nobody.” He sets his heart on acquiring property and does not let any obstacle dissuade him. If he becomes hated along the way, he couldn't care less. In spite of enormous sacrifices and setbacks, Duddy never loses faith in realizing his dream.

The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz is the novel that established Mordecai Richler as one of the world's best comic writers. A classic tale of coming of age on Montreal's St. Urbain Street, it is an unforgettable story of ambition, dreams, and familial love.

Fifth Business
Robertson Davies

Ramsay is a man twice born, a man who has returned from the hell of the battle-grave at Passchendaele in World War I decorated with the Victoria Cross and destined to be caught in a no man's land where memory, history, and myth collide. As Ramsay tells his story, it begins to seem that from boyhood, he has exerted a perhaps mystical, perhaps pernicious, influence on those around him. His apparently innocent involvement in such innocuous events as the throwing of a snowball or the teaching of card tricks to a small boy in the end prove neither innocent nor innocuous. Fifth Business stands alone as a remarkable story told by a rational man who discovers that the marvelous is only another aspect of the real.

The Manticore
Robertson Davies

Around a mysterious death is woven a glittering, fantastical, cunningly contrived trilogy of novels. Luring the reader down labyrinthine tunnels of myth, history and magic, THE DEPTFORD TRILOGY provides an exhilarating antidote to a world from where 'the fear and dread and splendour of wonder have been banished'.

World of Wonders
Robertson Davies

This is the third novel in Davies's major work, The Deptford Trilogy. This novel tells the life story of the unfortunate boy introduced in The Fifth Business, who was spirited away from his Canadian home by one of the members of a traveling side show, the Wanless World of Wonders.

[Usivius]

Good selection of books there. Robertson Davies can well be described as a haunting writer.
I think one of my favourites is Gwendolyn McKewan...