Postmodern Canadian Fiction: A Select List
Explore a curated selection of postmodern Canadian fiction with this essential book list. Discover groundbreaking novels and authors that redefine narrative style and themes in contemporary literature.
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Surfacing
by Margaret Atwood
From the bestselling author of The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments—this story of an artist who goes in search of her missing father on a remote island in northern Quebec is a provocative blend of literary mystery, psychological thriller, and spiritual journey. Accompanied by her boyfriend and a young married couple, the artist searches her abandoned childhood home for clues her parents may have left. But in the disorienting, transformative isolation of the wilderness, her friends’ marriage begins to crumble, sex becomes a catalyst for conflict, and violence and death lurk just beneath the surface. As her relentless probing leads to an electrifying confrontation with her own suppressed secrets, she rapidly descends into what could be either madness or the starkest self-knowledge. Margaret Atwood’s haunting masterpiece is permeated with suspense, complex with layered meanings, and written in brilliant, diamond-sharp prose.
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Deaf to the City
by Marie-Claire Blais
This compelling story explores the motley crew of characters--including mother-turned-stripper Gloria, alcoholic Tim, frequent jailbird Charlie, and the suicidal wife of a rich doctor--who call the rundown HĂ´tel des Voyageurs home. Mesmerizing in its passion and humility, the narrative evokes the despair and innocence present in modern urban surroundings.
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Selkie
by Anne Cameron
One morning it starts raining in Cassidy's house, and nobody can get it to stop. Like everyone else, Cassisy figures it's just a problem with the pipes. She doesn't know that she's about to embark on the ride of her life. She doesn't know that before the year is out, she will have wound up in hospital with every bruise and welt from her twenty-year marriage showing on her body, and survived a surreal whale-watching raft accident, and travelled through lifetimes and constellations, and written her life story into a salt-encrusted rock on a deserted beach. Even more strange and wonderful, she will have experienced the selkies, those mythical creatures, half-seal, half-woman, who swim through the deepest waters of every woman's heart.
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Tempting Faith DiNapoli
by Lisa Gabriele
Smart, witty, and emotionally generous, this charming coming-of-age novel explores a Catholic girl's crises of confidence and faith with graceful prose--an accomplished, big-hearted debut.
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The Moslem Wife and Other Stories
by Mavis Gallant
These stories embody the beauty, irony, and compassion of a master writer's fictional universe. Gallant deploys her sharp comic eye to superb effect: in the figures who move through her stories, we catch troubling, fleeting glimpses of our own lives.
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We So Seldom Look on Love
by Barbara Gowdy
Now in paperback, this masterfully crafted story collection by the author of the internationally best-selling novel Mister Sandman is a haunting book that is certain to both disturb and entertain. With a particular focus on obsession and the abnormal, We So Seldom Look On Love explores life at its quirky extremes, pushing past limits of convention into lives that are fantastic and heartbreakingly real. Whether writing about the dilemma of a two-headed man who attempts to expunge his own pain, the shock of a woman who discovers she has married a transsexual, the erotic delusions of a woman who repeatedly exposes her body to an unknown voyeur, or the bizarre predilections of a female necrophile (a story made into the acclaimed motion picture, "Kissed"), Gowdy convinces us with incisive detail, only to disarm us with black humor.
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The Stand-in
by David Helwig
`David Helwig's The Stand-In is a witty, inventive, sometimes disturbing excursion into the genre of the dramatic monologue, that literary form perfected in poetry by Robert Browning, and here equally successful in prose, in which a single speaker addressing an unseen audience reveals more about himself than he realizes or perhaps intended. The speaker in this case is a retired university professor who has returned to the small Canadian university, where he taught for many years, to deliver a series of three memorial lectures. As he explains immediately, he is there as a substitute speaker because the original guest lecturer, Denman Tarrington, has died suddenly in New York. It quickly transpires that Professor X, the stand-in (whose name we never learn), was a colleague of Tarrington at the same university, and what follows are not so much three lectures as three virtuoso stream of consciousness outpourings of personal reminiscence, to the frustration of the professor's audience and the entertainment of the reader. Ironically, the title of the lecture series is "The Music of No Mind," and if one were to seek an analogy between this novella and a musical composition, the choice would have to be Elgar's Enigma Variations, in which the composer claimed there exists a hidden unheard but familiar theme, the identification of which has baffled music scholars ever since. What is important in Professor X's apparently dithering extemporaneous digressions is not so much what is said as what is unsaid or hinted at.'
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The Elizabeth Stories
by Isabel Huggan
A series of linked stories about a girl growing up in a small town. In "Jack of hearts", Elizabeth is cast in a male role for a ballet recital, and in "Sorrows of the flesh", a crush on the science teacher turns sour when he is exposed as a wife beater. Some strong language and some descriptions of sex.
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Gaff Topsails
by Patrick Kavanagh
In the literary tradition of "The Shipping News" and "The Bird Artist", this debut work evokes a world suffused with images and presences of spirits and saints, the drowned and the saved, during the Feast of St. John in 1948.
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A Jest of God
by Margaret Laurence
Rachel ongs to free herself from the pettiness and deceit of he everyday life.
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Fugitive Pieces
by Anne Michaels
A tale of Holocaust survival whose protagonist is Jakob Beer, a Jewish boy in Poland. He is saved from death by a Greek scientist who takes him home to his island, where Beer develops an interest in archeology. He describes the way the Nazis manipulated archeology to prove the superiority of the Aryan race. A first novel.
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Swimming Lessons and Other Stories from Firozsha Baag
by Rohinton Mistry
Explores the crowded, throbbing life of India in a collection of stories set in Firozsha Baag, a Bombay apartment building characterized by an unexpected sense of community.
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Dance of the Happy Shades
by Alice Munro
A young girl gets an unexpected glimpse into her father's past. A married woman tries to release her homebound sister after the death of their mother. The audience at a piano recital receives a transforming surprise. These early stories conjure ordinary lives with an extraordinary vision, displaying the remarkable talent for which writer Alice Munro is celebrated. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.
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In the Skin of a Lion
by Michael Ondaatje
Bristling with intelligence and shimmering with romance, this novel tests the boundary between history and myth. Patrick Lewis arrives in Toronto in the 1920s and earns his living searching for a vanished millionaire and tunneling beneath Lake Ontario. In the course of his adventures, Patrick's life intersects with those of characters who reappear in Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning The English Patient. 256 pp.
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Martin Sloane
by Michael Redhill
The story of a relationship across two decades, of Jolene's search for Martin Sloane when one day he disappears from their home without warning or explanation, is told in a novel that brilliantly and movingly explores the vagaries of love and friendship, the burdens of personal history, and the enigmatic power of art.
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Swann
by Carol Shields
The lives of four amazingly different individuals become intertwined with that of Mary Swann, a rural Canadian poet of delicate verse whose genuine talent is only discovered after she is brutally murdered.
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Away
by Jane Urquhart
A stunning, evocative novel set in Ireland and Canada, Away traces a family's complex and layered past. The narrative unfolds with shimmering clarity, and takes us from the harsh northern Irish coast in the 1840s to the quarantine stations at Grosse Isle and the barely hospitable land of the Canadian Shield; from the flourishing town of Port Hope to the flooded streets of Montreal; from Ottawa at the time of Confederation to a large-windowed house at the edge of a Great Lake during the present day. Graceful and moving, Away unites the personal and the political as it explores the most private, often darkest corners of our emotions where the things that root us to ourselves endure. Powerful, intricate, lyrical, Away is an unforgettable novel.
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Crackpot
by Adele Wiseman
Hoda, the protagonist of Crackpot, is one of the most captivating characters in Canadian fiction. Graduating from a tumultuous childhood to a life of prostitution, she becomes a legend in her neighbourhood, a canny and ingenious woman, generous, intuitive, and exuding a wholesome lust for life. Resonant with myth and superstition, this radiant novel is a joyous celebration of life and the mystery that is at the heart of all experience.