Here are 100 books that Talking to Canadians fans have personally recommended if you like
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I am fortunate to have been blessed with a positive disposition. When my toast falls on the floor I like to believe it will land butter side up. I learned at a very early age that owning one's mistakes and airing them out loud could bring on laughter or a smile of recognition that many of us suffer the same fears as we navigate this often uncharted life with our fingers crossed or hands in prayer, that we will mostly get it right. This is why I write the books I write. By nature, I am a happiness ambassador… And humor is my weapon of choice.
I loved reading this book before it became tainted by fact checkers. That being said, it remains a fascinating, raw, and gripping read. His use of language as falls deeper and deeper into becoming hooked is similar to being a storm chaser. He can’t help himself chasing the highs, knowing full well the low may be the last one. “I want a drink. I want fifty drinks. I want a bottle of the purest, strongest, most destructive, most poisonous alcohol on Earth. I want fifty bottles of it. I want crack, dirty and yellow and filled with formaldehyde. I want a pile of powder meth, five hundred hits of acid, a garbage bag filled with mushrooms, a tube of glue bigger than a truck, a pool of gas large enough to drown in. I want something anything whatever however as much as I can.”
At the age of 23, James Frey woke up on a plane to find his front teeth knocked out and his nose broken. He had no idea where the plane was headed nor any recollection of the past two weeks. An alcoholic for ten years and a crack addict for three, he checked into a treatment facility shortly after landing. There he was told he could either stop using or die before he reached age 24. This is Frey’s acclaimed account of his six weeks in rehab.
Adventures in the Radio Trade documents a life in radio, largely at Canada's public broadcaster. It's for people who love CBC Radio, those interested in the history of Canadian Broadcasting, and those who want to hear about close encounters with numerous luminaries such as Margaret Atwood, J. Michael Straczynski, Stuart…
The 1930s have always fascinated me. It was such a historically difficult time for the entire world. The Great Depression, the rise of Nazi Germany, WWII, and the rise of two of the world’s most notable leaders, FDR and Winston Churchill. I have spent years of study on this period and written three novels that take place during the thirties. Does it make me an expert? Only one deeply familiar with an exciting decade.
Towles does an excellent job in weaving a narrative that captures a different side to the Great Depression.
It’s not the poverty, the homeless, the downtrodden, but the elite and how they navigated the thirties. Although the protagonist (Katey) is a working-class woman, Towles creates moral complexities for her that paint a vivid picture of the world of the thirties from the heights of the elite.
It gave me a perspective of the thirties I sometimes ignored because it doesn’t fit the image of the unemployment line, the soup kitchens, and people jumping out of windows after the crash. I was able to view the thirties from a different angle.
From the #1 New York Times-bestselling author of The Lincoln Highway and A Gentleman in Moscow, a “sharply stylish” (Boston Globe) book about a young woman in post-Depression era New York who suddenly finds herself thrust into high society—now with over one million readers worldwide
On the last night of 1937, twenty-five-year-old Katey Kontent is in a second-rate Greenwich Village jazz bar when Tinker Grey, a handsome banker, happens to sit down at the neighboring table. This chance encounter and its startling consequences propel Katey on a year-long journey into the upper echelons of New York society—where she will have…
I'm a veteran author, journalist, and journalism professor who has taught over 1000 students. At the age of 50, through a memoir I began writing, I fell down a rabbit hole of memory and began to suspect I had been sexually abused as a child. The man was a close family friend, who liked to call himself my grandfather. He did not speak English. My parents were immigrants and the usual difficulties of retrieving memories from childhood were complicated by the fact that they were all in the Czech language. For years I read everything I could find about childhood sexual abuse and then everything I could read about psychoanalysis.
This book narrates many kinds of trauma but the essay on sexual assault is worth buying the book.
A Canadian actor, director, and writer, Polley recounts her three-decade-long silence about Jian Ghomeshi, the hip, popular host of a hit CBC talk show. She moves from the ’90s to 2017, zeroing in on her flickering memories of assault, her reluctance to speak about it, her examination of that reluctance, her interrogation of other women in her situation, of lawyers, and her thoughts about it now.
It begins when she is outed on Twitter: “Wonder why Sarah Polley never spoke out about being assaulted by Jian Ghomeshi. #HerToo. She was the woman who stayed silent. Ask her.” Brilliant account of why women who are sexually abused do not speak out.
“A visceral and incisive collection of six propulsive personal essays.” – Vanity Fair
*A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice*Named a Most-Anticipated Book of 2022 by Entertainment Weekly, Lit Hub, and AV Club*
Oscar-nominated screenwriter, director, and actor Sarah Polley’s Run Towards the Danger explores memory and the dialogue between her past and her present
These are the most dangerous stories of my life. The ones I have avoided, the ones I haven’t told, the ones that have kept me awake on countless nights. As these stories found echoes in my adult life, and then went another, better way…
Adventures in the Radio Trade documents a life in radio, largely at Canada's public broadcaster. It's for people who love CBC Radio, those interested in the history of Canadian Broadcasting, and those who want to hear about close encounters with numerous luminaries such as Margaret Atwood, J. Michael Straczynski, Stuart…
I am fortunate to have been blessed with a positive disposition. When my toast falls on the floor I like to believe it will land butter side up. I learned at a very early age that owning one's mistakes and airing them out loud could bring on laughter or a smile of recognition that many of us suffer the same fears as we navigate this often uncharted life with our fingers crossed or hands in prayer, that we will mostly get it right. This is why I write the books I write. By nature, I am a happiness ambassador… And humor is my weapon of choice.
Epic is not a word I use lightly but in the case of The Last Crossing, it’s not an overstatement. At its core it’s a story of family, A cruel father, power, and his three sons, all of whom bare the scars from their upbringing. Loyalty, betrayal, insecurity, and often cruelty. Flaws and frailty live within us all but never quite so viscerally It’s the 1800s, set in the uncharted Canadian west, a wild and dangerous place but breathtakingly beautiful - strikingly different from the opulence of England playing out in opposition. There was also so much research put into this journey that while being taken on the adventure, I learned so much without ever feeling the lessons.
Reading this novel, I was stunned at its scope. History comes alive on this journey, which is often so uncomfortable, with a cast of characters that on occasion repelled me but…
Charles and Addington Gaunt must find their free- spirited brother, Simon, who has gone missing in the wilds of the American West. They enlist the services of a guide to lead them on their journey across a harsh and unknown landscape. This is the enigmatic Jerry Potts, half Blackfoot, half Scottish, who suffers his own painful past. They are joined by Lucy Stoveall, a woman filled with rage and sorrow over the loss of her young sister Madge who was brutally murdered. She is on a vengeful mission to track down and kill the murderous Kelso brothers. The group is…
I’ve spent most of my life fascinated by what happens when women stop editing themselves. As a former television reporter, health educator, and memoirist, I’ve lived on both sides of the polished story and the private reckoning in my search for truth. Writing my own memoir forced me to confront how often women are encouraged to soften conflict, spiritualize pain, or tidy up the truth to make it more palatable. I’m drawn to books that refuse that impulse—stories where healing isn’t performative, and transformation isn’t neat.
I love this book because it refuses to sanitize childhood chaos.
I know Cea personally, and knowing what it took for her to tell this story makes the book even more powerful. Her upbringing was wildly unconventional—often unsafe—and she doesn’t soften that truth to make it more inspirational or digestible.
What stayed with me wasn’t just the extremity of her early life, but the clarity with which she tells it: no victimhood, no theatrics, no moral clean-up. This book reminded me that resilience doesn’t come from pretending things weren’t messy—it comes from looking directly at what was, and choosing consciousness anyway.
Sex, drugs, and . . . bug stew? In the vein of The Glass Castle and Wild, Cea Sunrise Person’s compelling memoir of a childhood spent with her dysfunctional counter-culture family in the Canadian wilderness—a searing story of physical, emotional, and psychological survival.
In the late 1960s, riding the crest of the counterculture movement, Cea’s family left a comfortable existence in California to live off the land in the Canadian wilderness. But unlike most commune dwellers of the time, the Persons weren’t trying to build a new society—they wanted to escape civilization altogether. Led by Cea’s grandfather Dick, they lived…
As a kid, I didn’t identify with the gender I was assigned at birth. Even without the language to describe who I really was, I was always on the lookout for stories about other people who felt like I did—for stories, in other words, like the ones on this list. But I never found them. As the books below beautifully illustrate, the spectrum of transgender experience, and our childhoods in particular, are so rich and diverse. My hope is for these and other books like Cactus Country to encourage more trans and queer people to tell their stories so that kids like us can find characters that represent them.
Elliot Page’s book is an engaging, worthwhile celebrity memoir. As a longtime fan of Page’s film performances and a trans person myself, I was so inspired by his public coming out and transition.
In his book, Page took me behind the scenes for an exclusive look at the unglamourous sides of Hollywood stardom—especially the ways the industry has historically been harmful to trans actors, many of whom, like Page, were encouraged to stay in the closet. I also appreciated that Page, as a celebrity, wrote the book himself without the help of ghostwriters.
Full of intimate stories, from chasing down secret love affairs to battling body image and struggling with familial strife, Pageboy is a love letter to the power of being seen. With this evocative and lyrical debut, Elliot Page captures the universal human experience of searching for ourselves and our place in this complicated world.
'Can I kiss you?' It was two months before the world premiere of Juno, and Elliot Page was in his first ever queer bar. The hot summer air hung heavy around him as he looked at her. And then it happened. In front of everyone. The…
After writing a novel about the toll true crime can take on victims’ loved ones and the risk it runs of glamourizing killers while overshadowing victims, I’ve been on the hunt for true crime books that don’t fall into these traps. The titles on this list showcase beautiful writing and tell compelling stories without dehumanizing the victims or glamourizing the perpetrators.
Gabby Petito. Natalee Holloway. Laci Peterson. These names probably sound familiar. Lauren Cho, Stephany Flores, and Latoyia Figueroa might not. This illustrates what news anchor Gwen Ifill dubbed “missing white woman syndrome,” the disproportionate media coverage in missing persons cases that attractive, upper-middle-class white women receive.
McDiarmid’s moving book illustrates this phenomenon, following the cases of thousands of Indigenous women who have disappeared from a stretch of road in British Columbia dubbed “The Highway of Tears.” For decades, the cases garnered little media attention until a white woman named Nicole Hoar disappeared in 2002, bringing more resources and coverage.
In painstaking detail, this immersive and necessary book follows several of these previously ignored women’s lives, illustrating the systemic issues that failed the victims and their loved ones.
“These murder cases expose systemic problems... By examining each murder within the context of Indigenous identity and regional hardships, McDiarmid addresses these very issues, finding reasons to look for the deeper roots of each act of violence.” —The New York Times Book Review
In the vein of the bestsellers I’ll Be Gone in the Dark and The Line Becomes a River, a penetrating, deeply moving account of the missing and murdered indigenous women and girls of Highway 16, and a searing indictment of the society that failed them.
For decades, Indigenous women and girls have gone missing or been…
In my life, I have always loved visiting the unsung places: villages rather than cities, places where I am the only tourist. In both reading and writing, I’m drawn to the quietly dramatic times, the moments before important events, or the aftermaths. I want to see how real characters live in real places dealing with real problems, even if all three are invented. I spent most of my childhood getting lost in books, emerging only long enough to return to the library to discover more places and times where I could snuggle between the covers of a story. As a writer, I hope I can do this for other readers.
We all need rock stars to idolize, and mine is Alice Munro, a Canadian writer whose books are mostly short story collections about the quietly intense lives of farmers and townspeople in rural Canada.
I’m from a generation of writers who learned about writing through the stories of Alice Munro, Anton Chekhov, and Raymond Carver, among others. Choosing my favorite Munro book is a challenge—for decades I read them all over and over—but if I had to, I’d say it’s Dance of the Happy Shades.
No one understands better what it’s like to be an adolescent girl than Alice Munro, and no one is more gifted at portraying it, particularly in the stories “An Ounce of Cure” and “Red Dress—1946,” with such generous characterizations and courageous honesty.
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 emerges from the layers of experience that lie behind even the most everyday events and lives.
"Virtuosity, elemental command, incisive like a diamond, remarkable: all these descriptions fit…
I was born in Mumbai, lived in Kolkata for most of my life, and am an educator and poet who lives in the US. I am a Bene Israel Jew from India. As a child, I was fascinated by all kinds of literature, mythology, folktales, and stories. I have been influenced by everything around me. My passion for literature probably inspired me to become a teacher and later a writer who is constantly exploring, creating, re-imagining, and evolving. My books are about the immigrant experience, displacement, racism, women’s issues, nature, the animal kingdom, to name a few. But within these themes, I also explore identity and belonging, death, loss and recovery.
Ayelet Tsabari’s stunning memoir is all about departure, wandering, displacement, identity, and belonging. As a Mizrahi, or non-European Jew, and a minority in Israeli society and culture, she establishes herself as a powerful voice for emigrants and minorities and speaks truth to power.
In the West, Ashkenazi Jewish culture dominates, and most people are ignorant of, and/or quite indifferent to, the myriad Jewish communities of the world and their complex and rich cultures. Her experiences in the Israeli army, her travels, her difficult relationships, her escape from trauma and pain as she enters into different worlds, and how she makes peace with herself. She focuses on those like herself on the margins of Israeli society and exposes the misogyny and discrimination she and other immigrants like herself experience on a daily basis.
Many of the aspects she writes about resonate deeply with me as an Indian immigrant in the US,…
An intimate memoir in essays by an award-winning Israeli writer who travels the world, from New York to India, searching for love, belonging, and an escape from grief following the death of her father when she was a young girl
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY KIRKUS REVIEWS
This searching collection opens with the death of Ayelet Tsabari’s father when she was just nine years old. His passing left her feeling rootless, devastated, and driven to question her complex identity as an Israeli of Yemeni descent in a country that suppressed and devalued her ancestors’ traditions.
I’ve been a writer most of my life, moving from high-school essays to working for newspapers to creating novels. One way or another, I’ve also spent much of that time exploring Canada's back roads and smaller communities. Those places and the people living in them have a pungent reality that I often find missing in the froth of modern urban society. The places and their people are interesting and inspiring, and I always get drawn back to reading and writing about them.
I was very much taken with this novel’s blend of romance, mystery, and exploration of whether you can ever go home again. Raddall doesn’t get much mention and is largely remembered for his other novels when he does. That’s a shame.
This 1956 work stands up very well against more recent works. It features unadorned yet persuasive prose that many modern writers can only wish for. Raddall quite evidently intended it as a loving, almost lyrical, description of rural Nova Scotia. He succeeded.
It was spring in Nova Scotia when Neil Jamieson returned to Oak Falls. Wild and resentful, he had run away fourteen years before. Now, still blustering and belligerent, educated but not subdued, he took a fresh look at the citizens of Oak Falls and particularly at the timber town's decaying sawdust aristocracy.
