The Annual Karissa Reads Books Literary Awards: Best Canadian Book

Hello and Welcome Back!

Today we’re delving into Can Lit. In case you didn’t know, I’m a Canadian and I strive to read Canadian fiction. I do this for a lot of reasons but primarily because I actually think Canadian writing is largely really good. I believe that our literature is one of the areas where Canada still has a distinct and interesting voice. A lot of our media is overshadowed or subsumed by American media but I think in books, Canada remains unique and I believe that should be supported.

I’ve approached this category in different ways over the years. Sometimes it’s simply what is the best book by a Canadian writer that I read in the past year. Sometimes it is what is a book that says something important about Canada and what it is to be Canadian. This year it’s a bit of both and I want to try something different. Instead of choosing a “winner” from these very diverse titles, I want to highlight 5 books I read from Canadian writers this past year and what I think they say about Canada.

Here they are in the order in which I read them in 2024:

The Future by Catherine Leroux

This book won the annual CBC Canada Reads competition at the beginning of 2024, shortly after I read it. Its win took me by surprise because it is kind of a weird little book. But I also think that says something about the Canadian Lit scene. We embrace a bit of weirdness. This book also has (to me, an Anglophone Canadian) a very Quebecois flavour. Not just because it is translated from French but because, again, it’s kind of weird but in a very charming way. It delves into an alternate idea of what our borders and our country could have been and it has a focus on children in all their wild and wonderful ways.

The Other Valley by Scott Alexander Howard

This is another book that exists in an alternate reality. Not in any version of Canada, per se, but in a sort of dystopian world that Howard beautifully creates. I loved this book and recommended it to a lot of people this year. Among the things that impressed me was that this is Howard’s first book and man, does he nail human nature. This is a book that speaks to youth and uncertainty and the pressure of choice that is laid on each of us and I think that’s a big topic, particularly for young people growing up in Canada today.

The Leap Year Gene by Shelley Wood

I perhaps should reveal that both this book and The Other Valley have a local connection for me. Both Howard and Wood have family on the Coast and have visited the Coast frequently. I’ve met both and chatted with Shelley several times. She’s a regular at my store, was a featured author at this year’s Writers Fest, and is all around a lovely person. So when I got an ARC of her book this spring, I went into it inclined to enjoy it and then was relieved when I genuinely did enjoy this, her second novel. This is a story that plays with science, both education and inventing. It’s a book that covers a large span of time and history and while it isn’t all set in Canada, a lot of that is Canadian history and, I think, speaks to the subtle influence we as a country have had on the past hundred or so years.

Doppelganger by Naomi Klein

I’ll keep this short because I lauded Klein’s work already in my Best Non-Fiction category. There’s a lot in Doppelganger and it covers a lot of the good and the bad of Canadian culture right now. Klein delves into healthcare, politics, Covid, and social thought. And when she’s talking about community, she’s literally talking about the community I live in, for better or worse.

Capital of Dreams by Heather O’Neill.

For those of you who don’t know, during the CBC Canada Reads, each of the five finalists are championed by a Canadian celebrity. (Mostly people you probably haven’t heard of if you live outside of Canada.) This year, Heather O’Neill championed the winning novel, The Future. Which made sense when I read it because O’Neill is also a kind of weird, Quebec-based writer. She’s exactly the kind of weird I enjoy and I really enjoyed her most recent novel, Capital of Dreams. This is O’Neill’s first book set outside of Montreal so it might not seem like it says a lot about Canada. But I think it speaks to one of the things that, in my opinion, makes Canada a great country. Which is that, at our best, we are not entirely self-focused. We care about other countries. We care about upholding what is right and just in the world. We are a country built on drawing in the best of a myriad of cultures and histories and when we do that well, we are very, very good. We are, hopefully, a country that embraces art and dreams and this is a book that celebrates those things and speaks to their power.