Canada Reads

Just before her 40th birthday, Gail Francis quit her perfectly good job and set out to hike one of the great trails of the world. Carrying everything she needed on her back, Francis spent five months walking from Mexico to Canada along the Pacific Crest Trail. Along the way, she lost her pack scrambling over scree in the desert, struggled to navigate high mountain passes, and wore the soles off her boots trekking across lava fields - all within some of the most pristine wilderness in the nation. Though she set out alone, her story includes an eclectic cast of characters.

Canada is not one nation, but three: English Canada, Quebec, and First Nations. Yet as a country Canada is very successful, in part because it maintains national diversity through bilingualism, multiculturalism, and federalism. Alongside this contemporary openness Canada also has its own history to contend with; with a legacy of broken treaties and residential schools for its Indigenous peoples, making reconciliation between Canada and First Nations an ongoing journey, not a destination.

Comedy superstar Mike Myers writes from the (true patriot) heart about his 53-year relationship with his beloved Canada. Mike Myers is a world-renowned actor, director and writer and the man behind some of the most memorable comic characters of our time. But, as he says, "No description of me is truly complete without saying I'm a Canadian". He has often winked and nodded to Canada in his outrageously accomplished body of work, but now he turns the spotlight full-beam on his homeland.

Savannah was four years old when her twin sister, Georgia, went missing from their small Louisiana town, fracturing their family. Twenty-eight years later, Savannah convinces her estranged older sisters, Rayanne and Sue Ellen, to honor the pact they made as children and retrieve the time capsule they buried in their old backyard. But coming home means confronting old ghosts…and their stubborn grandmother, Meemaw.

Seventeen-year-old Victoria Nash runs the household on her family's peach farm in the small ranch town of Iola, Colorado—the sole surviving female in a family of troubled men. Wilson Moon is a young drifter with a mysterious past, displaced from his tribal land but determined to live as he chooses. Victoria's chance encounter with Wil on a street corner profoundly alters both of their young lives, igniting as much passion as danger. When tragedy strikes, Victoria leaves the only life she has ever known, fleeing into the nearby mountains.

When 15-year-old Dell Parsons' parents rob a bank, his sense of normal life is forever altered. In an instant, this private cataclysm drives his life into before and after, a threshold that can never be uncrossed. His parents' arrest and imprisonment mean a threatening and uncertain future for Dell and his twin sister, Berner. Willful and burning with resentment, Berner flees their home in Montana, abandoning her brother and her life. But Dell is not completely alone. A family friend intervenes, spiriting him across the Canadian border.

Terrorists obtain a nuclear bomb ...and it’s heading for America. Green Beret operative George Ferrar faces his nemesis in a dark cave in Afghanistan…then learns that a loose nuke is heading to America's heartland. But who will believe him? Everybody from the CIA to the FBI to Congress thinks he has turned against America. Ferrar is resourceful, knowledgeable, and deadly, but must take his game to a whole new level to stay alive, track down the bomb, and save the nation. He races against time as the bomb slips through the hands of numerous countries, from Pakistan to Bahrain to Canada ...

Back in the long ago nineties, Rachel Walsh was a mess. But a spell in rehab transformed everything. Life became very good, very quickly. These days, Rachel has love, family, a great job as an addiction counsellor, she even gardens. Her only bad habit is a fondness for expensive sneakers. But with the sudden reappearance of a man she'd once loved, her life wobbles. She'd thought she was settled. Fixed forever. Is she about to discover that no matter what our age, everything can change? Is it time to think again, Rachel?

When Daniel Turner was made redundant, he took a job as a park ranger in Canada, leaving behind England and his wife. What he did not know, until he got out there, was that the park held many disturbing secrets. He discovered that his predecessor had been murdered, and that when the thaw arrived after the previous winter; several missing young girls had been found naked and frozen to death. When a similar cycle of events started again, shortly after his arrival, Danny decided it was time to track down the person who was responsible for these perverted crimes, but finds himself locked up in ...

One freezing winter morning a dead body is found in the backyard of the Dharma family’s house. It’s the body of Anu Krishnan. For Anu, a writer seeking a secluded retreat from the city, the Dharmas' "back-house" in the sleepy mountain town of Merrit's Point was the ideal spot to take a year off and begin writing.

The fifth book in the Canadian Winters series. Follow Danny Turner's adventures in Canada and other countries.

We were introduced to Ranger Daniel Turner in book one of this series when he left England to become a park ranger in the wilds of Canada. After his investigations into a serial killers activities in book one, in book two he finds other things and falls in love, marrying a local woman with 3 children. Now after the honeymoon is over he decides to fight his fear of flying and learn to fly a helicopter. One of his new family falls ill and Danny needs to move Heaven and Earth to save the sick child. Klondike Bill take on an angry bear to save the boy he is looking after and Danny comes face to...

Christmas has never been more complicated! Goldie Gill works in a recruiting firm in Toronto and has had it with his mother's single-minded desire to see him married off to a nice girl. Goldie has no wish to find himself a nice girl - he is perfectly happy living the life and hanging out with his cat, Billy. It takes a chance encounter with a dusky, doe-eyed, scatter-brained beauty, just before Christmas, for Goldie to seriously reconsider his plans. But then, he learns that his meeting with the girl isn't a happy coincidence - somebody has been meddling. What is the conspiracy and how is ...

If you love the earth and a compelling read, this book is for you. Dale became an environmental scientist to help save the earth, but at 36, she is jaded with the reality of her job. Meanwhile, just as she struggles to connect with her glamourous mother and navigate her siblings’ complex problems, she and her husband embark on another round of IVF. But just as the suffocating pressures of everyday life threaten to overwhelm Dale, she leaves on a work trip to Thailand. Working on a landfill site halfway around the world, she unexpectedly becomes captivated by a neighbouring village and its...

There have been many Clayton Thomas-Mullers: The child who played with toy planes as an escape from domestic and sexual abuse, enduring the intergenerational trauma of Canada's residential school system; the angry youngster who defended himself with fists and sharp wit against racism and violence, at school and on the streets of Winnipeg and small-town British Columbia; the tough teenager who, at 17, managed a drug house run by members of his family, and slipped in and out of juvie, operating in a world of violence and pain.

The child of South-Asian migrants, Kazim Ali was born in London, lived as a child in the cities and small towns of Manitoba, and made a life in the United States. As a man passing through disparate homes, he has never felt he belonged to a place. And yet, one day, he finds himself thinking of Jenpeg, a community thrown up around the building of a hydroelectric dam on the Nelson River, where he once lived for several years as a child. Does the town still exist, he wonders? Is the dam still operational?

Amanda's glamping getaway in Canada turns into a fur-nomenal fiasco when her psychic cat stumbles upon a body! Can Amanda and her forgetful feline sidekick solve the campground caper before it becomes a cat-astrophe? Dog groomer Amanda Warren is taking a paws from her clippers for a much-needed vacation. Her friend Ben has booked them into a Canadian gourmet glamping resort. But Amanda’s dreams of rest and relaxation quickly go out the doggy door when her quirky cat — a psychic with a case of amnesia — secretly tags along. Now, with a lost Yorkshire terrier, a discovered body, and a ...

For 19-year-old Mickey, Instagram offers a tantalizing portal into the world she wishes she inhabited. Though beautiful, cunning, and privileged, Mickey finds herself with a stalled modelling career, an escalating drinking problem, few friends, and next to nothing in the bank. To numb her growing despair, she spends her days frantically refreshing her Instagram feed, obsessively tracking the movements of Insta-famous model Gemma Anton.