Great Canadian Novels

Ebullient and perverse, thrice married, Barney Panofsky has always clung to two cherished beliefs: life is absurd and nobody truly ever understands anybody else. But when his sworn enemy publicly states that Barney is a wife abuser, an intellectual fraud and probably a murderer, he is driven to write his own memoirs.

Strong women and hard-luck hardheaded men, all searching for the middle ground between First Nations’ traditions and the modern world, perform an elaborate dance of approach and avoidance in this magical, rollicking tale by Cherokee author Thomas King. Alberta is a university professor who would like to trade her two boyfriends for a baby but no husband; Lionel is forty and still sells televisions for a patronizing boss; Eli and his log cabin stand in the way of a profitable dam project.

The novel chronicles a young girl’s growing up in rural Ontario in the 1940s. Del Jordan lives out at the end of the Flats Road on her father’s fox farm, where her most frequent companions are an eccentric bachelor family friend and her rough younger brother. When she begins spending more time in town, she is surrounded by women—her mother, an agnostic, opinionated woman who sells encyclopedias to local farmers; her motherr’s boarder, the lusty Fern Dogherty; and her best friend, Naomi, with whom she shares the frustrations and unbridled glee of adolescence. Through these unwitting mentors and in her own encounters with sex, birth, and death, Del explores the dark and bright sides of womanhood.

Barbados-born Clarke’s ninth novel, which earned him the 2002 Giller Prize and the 2003 Commonwealth Writers Prize, is a tragic, complex story of postcolonial Barbadian life following World War II. Oppression still flourishes on Bimshire, an island controlled by &lsdquo;the Plantation,” where women like Miss Bellfeels are basically chattel. Miss Bellfeels, known to the villagers as Mary-Mathilda, eventually escapes the toil of field labor and housework. But as the kept woman of Mr. Bellfeels, the powerful plantation manager, she is not accepted into the island’s upper echelon.

This is the poignant story of Daisy Goodwill, twentieth-century pilgrim, from her calamitous birth in Canada to her death in a Florida nursing home nearly ninety years later. Struggling to find her place in the world, she listens and observes, becoming a witness to her own life and death in this rich tale.

Surfacing, Atwood's second novel, is one woman’s haunting quest for her own self.A nameless woman travels to an island cabin in desolate northern Quebec where she spent her childhood, to search for her missing father. In the course of a few painful days, the truth about her own life surfaces, the experiences made all the more lonely by the company of her current lover and another couple—who are unaware of the processes moving within her.