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Anne of Green Gables
L. M. Montgomery
Novel, 1908
Rural Prince Edward Island in the late 1800s, with its red roads, farming community and seaside landscape shaping an orphan's childhood.
Books by country North America
Books set in Canada
Five books by writers from Canada, set there, that give a real sense of the place, starting with Anne of Green Gables and The Stone Diaries.
About the literature of Canada
Canada's best-known literary name is Alice Munro, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013 for her short stories. Writers in Canada publish in English and French, the country's two official languages, and Indigenous peoples told stories aloud for many generations before either was written down here. Much of the fiction is rooted in particular regions, from the Atlantic coast to Ontario and Manitoba.
L. M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables, published in 1908, shows an orphan growing up in rural Prince Edward Island. Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace draws on a real 1840s murder case in Upper Canada. Alistair MacLeod's No Great Mischief portrays Cape Breton Gaelic families with Scottish roots, and Carol Shields's The Stone Diaries traces a woman's life across the twentieth century from a Manitoba quarry town to Ontario.
By writers from Canada
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The Stone Diaries
Carol Shields
Novel, 1993
Follows a woman's life across the 20th century from a Manitoba quarry town to Ontario, capturing ordinary Canadian domestic history.
Fifth Business
Robertson Davies
Novel, 1970
A small Ontario town's Protestant culture and later Toronto life frame this novel of myth and memory across the early 20th century.
Alias Grace
Margaret Atwood
Novel, 1996
A real 1840s murder case in Upper Canada explores class, Irish immigration, asylums and Victorian Ontario society.
No Great Mischief
Alistair MacLeod
Novel, 1999
Cape Breton Gaelic families, their Scottish roots, mining and migration shape this elegiac novel of Nova Scotia.
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