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It's natural enough for any aspiring writer to expect that selling your first novel will forever change your life. While I've found my expectations well satisfied in this regards—mainly because seeing one book into print made it easier to justify, to my family and myself, all the time I spent holed up in a little room writing the next—one unanticipated benefit of becoming a "bona fide" novelist has been that it's introduced me to a wealth of authors I likely never would have encountered otherwise. With that in mind, this is a list of some of my favourite Canadian books I might never have discovered had I not become a published author myself.
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Last Hummingbird West Of Chile, by Nicholas Ruddock
I was living in Guelph when I first read Roberto Bolaňo and his fiction would ultimately inspire me to become a novelist. I was thus elated to learn that—shortly after I completed my first novel—Nicholas, another Guelph writer, used a Bolaňo quote as the epigraph for his The Parabolist. Over the ensuing decade, a new Nicholas Ruddock book was always a cause for celebration in our household, though neither his superlative short story collection How Loveta Got Her Baby nor his equally engaging second novel, Night Ambulance, truly prepared me for the bountiful feast he harvests in his latest book Last Hummingbird West Of Chile. Its story of a young English aristocrat fleeing the violence required to sustain his family’s affluence in search of a less oppressive path is recounted in the first person by a wildly diverse collection of characters, both human and animal (and, at one point, even a white oak tree fashioned into a ship), and, much to Nicholas’ credit as a stylist, his supple prose seamlessly integrates these perspectives into such a vast panorama that it comes to feel like the very world itself is bursting to tell the tale of these interminably beguiling, and all-too-often irrepressibly violent yet endlessly captivating, interlopers we call human beings.
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When Words Deny the World, by Stephen Henighan
It was during the launch for Nicholas's How Loveta Got Her Baby at The Bookshelf in Guelph that Stephen Henighan asked if he could sit in the empty chair beside mine, a most fortuitous encounter indeed! While I have come to greatly admire his fiction, his latest book The World of After being a particular favourite, it's hard to overstate just how encouraging it was for me when I opened up When Words Deny the World, his collection of critical essays on Canadian literary culture, and was confronted by this on the first page of his introduction: "Rather than developing into a variant species better suited to a warmer or cooler climate, the writer—the writer who grips us and forces us to see—evolves in opposition to his environment. The writer emerges as an antagonist to or a subtle dissenter from the surrounding society; she wants to write the books that are missing from the catalogues of literature."
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Halfbreed, by Maria Campbell
When asked to qualify exactly what I believe is absent from Canadian fiction, I usually begin by referencing how the publisher of Maria Campbell's 1973 memoir Halfbreed excised a scene recounting a rape by an RCMP officer from the book, though the first time I read it such a revelation hadn't yet become public knowledge. Then, I was simply awestruck by just how closely her portrayal of Canada aligned with the Canada I so eagerly sought to "reveal" in my fiction. The scenes in Vancouver, in particular, might as well have been set during the eight years I spent there in the 1990s and while reading those I had to constantly remind myself that Maria was actually writing about her experiences in the late 1950s.
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Combat Camera, by A.J Somerset
Having enjoyed many an hour conversing with a multitude of ex-soldiers cum novelists while attending the Bouchercon crime/mystery writing conventions in Raleigh and Dallas, I've often lamented on just how rare a species they are in Canada. A.J. is one of those all-too-rare exceptions and had the fine folks at The Bookshelf not arranged for his friend, author Mark Sampson, to co-launch his novel, Sad Peninsula, alongside my Cipher, then A.J.'s Combat Camera would most surely have fallen beneath my radar. The book feels so true to life that, at times, it reads almost like a memoir itself, rather than a piece of fiction, and if there is a more compelling novel—Canadian or otherwise—depicting just how isolating the violence in one's past can be for someone trying to move beyond trauma, I have yet to discover it.
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Tale of a Boon's Wife, by Fartumo Kusow
I had the good fortune of reading an excerpt from another of Fartumo's novels while acting as a peer assessor for the Ontario Arts Council. Its opening chapter, depicting the abduction of three girls from a village in Somalia, was as harrowing a bit of fiction as I've ever read and I was later happy to learn that she'd previously had published Tale of a Boon's Wife. I found it just as harrowing, in its entirety, as the 20-page sample I'd read from but reading it as I did on the heels of the revelations surrounding the mass graves discovered at the Kamloops Residential School, I also divined in it a deeper truth. To quote an email I sent to a fellow ECW author in June, 2021: "I can't think of a single author in this country who deals with violence better than her (and the violence in her tale is extreme, to say the least). If there's anyone who'd be able to provide the requisite insights into how Canadian literature might be able to adapt to better reflect our own violence, I'd bet it would be Fartumo."
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The High-Rise in Fort Fierce, by Paul Carlucci
As luck would have it, Paul was also an assessor on the aforementioned OAC jury. After our duties were complete, we headed out into what would prove to be the worst blizzard to hit Toronto in a decade, in search of libations. It was while sipping pints at the first of three bars that I'd learn Paul had also spent time in Guysborough, Nova Scotia, which seemed just short of miraculous in that it's rare to find anyone who's even heard of Guysborough, much less someone who's actually lived there as my partner Tanja and I did from 2001 to 2004. My little "adventure" with Paul ended with us shooting pool at the last bar with a group of five Indigenous patrons taking a break from the drug rehab centre around the corner and I mention this not simply because it's one of my fondest memories as a writer, but also because that evening would merely be my first taste of the world Paul writes about so eloquently, and often so brutally, in The High-Rise on Fort Fierce (even if his collection of interconnected short stories is set mostly in the Yukon.)
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Legacy, by Waubgeshig Rice
Meeting fellow ECW author Waub Rice on a drizzly spring morning at a picnic spot halfway between Sudbury, where he was living, and North Bay, where I was, served as a kind of exclamation mark on the three years I spent in Northern Ontario researching and writing my last three novels. As authors meeting for the first time sometimes do, we exchanged books. That's how I came to read Legacy and, while Waub is better known for Moon of the Crusted Snow, I find my thoughts more often lingering on the former. Equal parts crime novel and domestic drama, Legacy unfolds with the patient doggedness of a veteran journalist chasing a particularly promising lead while also lending a heartbreakingly human face to the members of one Northern Ontario family struggling, each in their own way, to come to terms with the murder of a loved one. Truly, a story for our times...
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Atacama, by Carmen Rodríguez
As a kind of Covid project, Tanja and I founded www.canneryrowpress.com, an online cultural journal. Most issues include a "Book Nook" and it wasn't long before we began to attract the attention of indie publishers, seemingly desperate to get reviews—any sort at all—for their latest releases. So it was that Fernwood Publishing sent us a digital copy of Atacama. To quote from my Book Nook review in the September, 2021 edition: "The book begins as a thoroughly compelling historical account of political oppression in [Carmen's] native Chile, recounted through the alternating perspectives of Manuel—from a 'working class' family of miners—and Lucía, the 'bourgeois' daughter of a ruthless officer in the Chilean army, and ultimately ends as a definitive call to action... [By doing so] it repositions the novel as the foremost means that we, as a society, have for not only remembering our past injustices so that they won’t be repeated, but for the hollowing out of a space within which to foster the kinds of imaginative leaps that Manuel and Lucía were able to make to lift themselves out of the bloody morass which had previously defined them and their country."
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Jerry Lewis Told Me I Was Going to Die, by Matthew Del Papa
In 2017 we relocated to Capreol, a small CN Rail hub just North of Sudbury, so I could research my fifth novel, Savage Gerry. Perusing the Sudbury Writers Guild's members list, I was pleased to discover that a one Matthew Del Papa was living in Carpeol and immediately called him to invite him over for a coffee, ostensibly so I could get the lay of the land. "Not unless your house has a ramp," he answered. "I'm in a wheelchair. But you're welcome to come over here." "Here" turned out to be a quick walk through the woods separating his neighbourhood from ours and, over the next 14 months, we'd spend countless hours at his house talking all things literary, and whatever else happened to spring to mind. The one thing we rarely talked about, mind you, was the Spinal Muscular Atrophy which has kept him confined to a wheelchair since he was eight, not because of any sort of awkwardness by either of us around the subject but because in the heat of our discussions it hardly seemed relevant (and our conversations could become deliriously heated.) Still, curious minds being what they are, I'll admit I oftentimes wanted to broach the topic with him in more depth which is why I was so pleased to hear that Sudbury's Latitude 46 would shortly be publishing his Jerry Lewis Told Me I Was Going to Die, a book of essays on that very subject. While the collection does fill in plenty of the blanks for this, or any, inquiring mind, that's the least of its myriad pleasures. With Mat's characteristically sardonic Northern Ontario wit, the book proceeds with the same rambling fury that I've come to treasure when speaking to him in person and, as with all good conversations, no topic is too profane, or too profound, to leave off the table and laughter is rarely more than a breath, or in this case, a page away.
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An electrifying mash-up of the western, sci-fi, and horror genres set against a backdrop of the housing, mental health, opioid, and climate crises
Ex–police chief Mason Lowry is hell-bent on retribution. Ten years ago he arrested outlaw biker Clarence Boothe for selling a bad batch of illicit narcotics that killed 37 people. Boothe’s gang retaliated by killing Lowry’s teenage granddaughter, and ever since Mason has been biding his time, waiting for the moment when he can exact his revenge. But unbeknownst to him, Clarence has been laying plans of his own.
In this-all-too-near future, addiction to the drug Euphoral has become epidemic. Withdrawal causes a violent psychosis, and on the night of their leader’s release, Clarence’s gang unleashes a waking nightmare by withholding its supply. Seeing the city he once swore to serve and protect descending into madness fuels Mason’s fury and he launches a one-man assault on Clarence’s compound. During the midnight raid, he’s saved from certain death by Meghan, a teenage captive with a violent past of her own who may just hold the key to something Mason had thought he’d lost forever: a chance at redemption.