Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

Robert Ross is a Canadian officer caught up in the nightmare world of World War I trench warfare; a world of mud and smoke, chlorine gas and rotting corpses. In this world gone mad, he performs a last desperate act to declare his commitment to life in the midst of death.

A Complicated Kindness

by Miriam Toews

Sixteen-year-old Nomi Nickel longs to hang out with Lou Reed and Marianne Faithfull in New York City’s East Village. Instead she’s trapped in East Village, Manitoba, a small town whose population is Mennonite: “the most embarrassing sub-sect of people to belong to if you’re a teenager.” East Village is a town with no train and no bar whose job prospects consist of slaughtering chickens at the Happy Family Farms... (more)

A Perfect Night to Go to China

by David Gilmour

This astonishing novel - unlike anything Gilmour has ever written before - begins with every parent's worst nightmare: the disappearance of a child. A father makes a casual error of judgement one evening and leaves his six-year-old son alone for fifteen minutes. When he returns the child is gone and three lives are changed forever. Has the boy been kidnapped? Spirited out of the country? Is he dead? The story... (more)

Such a Long Journey (Vintage International)

Such a Long Journey (Vintage International)

by Rohinton Mistry

A moving domestic tragi-comedy that introduces readers to Gustad Noble, a devout Parsi and dedicated family man, who becomes enmeshed in the corruption of the Indira Gandhi years. His journey back to himself manages to be comical and heartbreaking, deeply compassionate and unsparing.

The Underpainter

by Jane Urquhart

In Rochester, New York, a seventy-five-year-old artist, Austin Fraser, is creating a new series of paintings recalling the details of his life and of the lives of those individuals who have affected him--his peculiar mother, a young Canadian soldier and china painter, a First World War nurse, the well-known American painter Rockwell Kent, and Sara, a waitress from the wilderness mining settlement of Silver Islet,... (more)

Clara Callan: A Novel

by Richard Bruce Wright

In a small town in Canada, Clara Callan reluctantly takes leave of her sister, Nora, who is bound for New York. It's a time when the growing threat of fascism in Europe is a constant worry, and people escape from reality through radio and the movies. Meanwhile, the two sisters -- vastly different in personality, yet inextricably linked by a shared past -- try to find their places within the complex web of social... (more)

The Diviners (Phoenix Fiction Series)

by Margaret Laurence

In The Diviners , Morag Gunn, a middle aged writer who lives in a farmhouse on the Canadian prairie, struggles to understand the loneliness of her eighteen-year-old daughter. With unusual wit and depth, Morag recognizes that she needs solitude and work as much as she needs the love of her family. With an afterword by Margaret Atwood. "Mrs. Laurence's <novel> is both poetic and muscular, and her... (more)

The Tin Flute

by Gabrielle Roy

The Tin Flute , Gabrielle Roy’s first novel, is a classic of Canadian fiction. Imbued with Roy’s unique brand of compassion and compelling understanding, this moving story focuses on a family in the Saint-Henri slums of Montreal, its struggles to overcome poverty and ignorance, and its search for love. An affecting story of familial tenderness, sacrifice, and survival during the Second World War, The Tin Flute ... (more)

The Law of Dreams: A Novel

by Peter Behrens

The Law of Dreams tells the story of a young man's epic passage from innocence to experience during The Great Famine in Ireland of 1847. On his odyssey through Ireland and Britain, and across the Atlantic to “the Boston states,” Fergus is initiated to violence, sexual heat, and the glories and dangers of the industrial revolution. Along the way, he meets an unforgettable generation of boy soldiers,... (more)

Elizabeth and After: A Novel

by Matt Cohen

A touching and resonant story of a man who returns to the small town of West Gull, Ontario, to mend his family’s legacy of alcohol and violence, to reconnect with his young daughter, and to reconcile himself with the spirit of his beautiful mother, killed several years earlier in a tragic accident. Elizabeth and After masterfully wraps us up in the lives of Carl and his family, and the other 683 odd residents of... (more)

Dance of the happy shades and other stories

Dance of the happy shades and other stories

by Alice Munro

In these fifteen short stories--her eighth collection of short stories in a long and distinguished career--Alice Munro conjures ordinary lives with an extraordinary vision, displaying the remarkable talent for which she is now widely celebrated. Set on farms, by river marshes, in the lonely towns and new suburbs of western Ontario, these tales are luminous acts of attention to those vivid moments when revelation... (more)

Bear (Nonpareil books)

by Marian Engel

a mousy, timid librarian is summoned to a remote Canadian island to inventory the estate of Colonel Cary, who, she learns soon enough, had a number of secrets. But the most surprising and enduring secret is a pet bear. In thirty pages, the reticent librarian meets the not so reticent bear and wonders if it would be good company. It is good company indeed. Intimate company. Shocking company.

Elle: A Novel

by Douglas H. Glover

Imagine a 16th-century society belle turned Robinson Crusoe, a female Don Quixote with an Inuit Sancho Panza, and you'll have an inkling of what's in store in Douglas Glover's outrageously Rabelaisian new novel - his first in ten years. Elle is a lusty, subversive riff on the discovery of the New World, the moment of first contact. Based on a true story, Elle chronicles the ordeals and adventures of a young French... (more)

A Song for Nettie Johnson

by Gloria Sawai

As Sawai deftly turns over the stones of these people's lives and reveals the squalor, the fear and the unhappiness that lie beneath, she also uncovers that most precious of human qualities - hope.

A Jest of God (Phoenix Fiction Series)

by Margaret Laurence

A thirty-four-year-old school teacher living with her mother, Rachel Cameron feels trapped in an environment of small-town deceit and pettiness--her own and that of others. She longs for contact with another human being who shares her rebellious spirit. Finally, by confronting both love and death, Rachel earns the freedom she desperately needs. Winner of the Governor General's Literary Award, A Jest of God ... (more)

Nights Below Station Street

by David Adams Richards

David Adams Richards’ Governor General’s Award-winning novel is a powerful tale of resignation and struggle, fierce loyalties and compassion. This book is the first in Richards’ acclaimed Miramichi trilogy. Set in a small mill town in northern New Brunswick, it draws us into the lives of a community of people who live there, including: Joe Walsh, isolated and strong in the face of a drinking problem; his wife,... (more)

The Handmaid's Tale

by Margaret Atwood

In the world of the near future, who will control women's bodies? Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead. She may leave the home of the Commander and his wife once a day to walk to food markets whose signs are now pictures instead of words because women are no longer allowed to read. She must lie on her back once a month and pray that the Commander makes her pregnant, because in an age of declining births,... (more)

The Stone Diaries

by Carol Shields

From her calamitous 1905 birth in Manitoba to her journey with her father to Indiana, throughout her years as a wife, mother, and widow, Daisy Stone Goodwill struggles to understand her place in her own life. Now, in old age, Daisy attempts to tell her life story within a novel that is itself about the limitations of autobiography.

Anil's Ghost

by Michael Ondaatje

With his first novel since the internationally acclaimed The English Patient , Booker Prize—winning author Michael Ondaatje gives us a work displaying all the richness of imagery and language and the piercing emotional truth that we have come to know as the hallmarks of his writing. Anil’s Ghost transports us to Sri Lanka, a country steeped in centuries of tradition, now forced into the late twentieth century... (more)

Whale Music

by Paul Quarrington

Des Howell is a former rock 'n' roll star who never leaves his secluded oceanfront mansion. Naked, rich and fabulously deranged, he subsists on a steady diet of whiskey, pharmaceuticals and jelly doughnuts and occasionally works on his masterpiece, "Whale Music." One day, upon awakening from his usual drunken stupor, Des discovers on his sofa a young alien from the faraway universe of Toronto. This girl has made... (more)

Shelfari Book Activity

Tags: governor general award winner

by Timothy Findley

by Miriam Toews

by David Gilmour

by Rohinton Mistry

by Jane Urquhart

by Richard Bruce Wright

by Margaret Laurence

by Gabrielle Roy

by Peter Behrens

by Matt Cohen

by Alice Munro

by Marian Engel

by Douglas H. Glover

by Gloria Sawai

by Margaret Laurence

by David Adams Richards

by Margaret Atwood

by Carol Shields

by Michael Ondaatje

by Paul Quarrington