One of the first Canadian books we picked up as school kids was likely Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery. Or Mordecai Richler’s Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang, perhaps, or The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz.

More recently, we might have picked up Mariko Tamaki’s This One Summer or Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes.

These books are important because they gave us some of our first glimpses into the way we see ourselves portrayed in our own literature. To mark the country’s 150th anniversary, we asked five of our frequent reviewers to pick the three Canadian books they think are must-reads. There were no date, era or genre restrictions, no need for them to be part of a vaunted CanLit canon — just books they thought were seminal to how we see ourselves. Here’s what they chose.

Toews tackles a difficult and deeply personal subject in her sixth book: suicide. Toews’ father and sister committed suicide 12 years apart, and while she wrote about her father’s case in the form of memoir, she chose fiction to memorialize her sister. Set in Winnipeg, Toews writes about two sisters, Yolandi, a writer, and Elfrieda, a gifted pianist, who are both sensitive, intense and love each other deeply. The plot is heartbreakingly simple — Yoli tries to convince Elf to not kill herself. Toews take a gut-wrenching story and injects quirky humour in every bit of it, all while asking larger questions about how mental health is treated in Canada and the place of assisted suicide in cases like her sister’s.

— Sadiya Ansari

This novel is not for the faint-hearted. A sprawling story told over 603 pages is set in an unnamed Indian city in the mid-1970s, when the country was undergoing political turmoil during the state of emergency declared by then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Mistry creates four characters that form an unlikely bond — a widow, a student she’s taken on as a boarder and two tailors she hires to help her out after she starts losing her eyesight. Mistry weaves in the impact that human rights violations committed by the government (such as forced sterilization) has on characters, but also the cruelties inherent in a deeply hierarchical society that makes it difficult to allow the bond between these four character to hold. This was the Bombay-born, Toronto-based Mistry’s second novel, earning him a Man Booker nomination, the Giller Prize, Governor General’s Award and the most important stamp of approval required to reach the masses — it became the first Canadian selection for Oprah’s Book Club.

— Sadiya Ansari

Published last year, Thien’s story follows the families of two talented musicians in China, through their experiences during China’s Cultural Revolution, the brutality of Tiananmen Square, and for one of them, escaping the past and settling in Vancouver. Thien traces their lives to their daughters, who meet in Vancouver after both of their fathers have died and try to uncover the connection. The prose is beautiful, the characters are unforgettable and the plot is fascinating. While the historical context of the book demands the type of specific details Thien uses to convey the brutality endured by her characters, the themes she draws out are universal: living in exile, family secrets and intergenerational trauma. Born in Vancouver and based in Montreal, this was Thien’s third novel, which was nominated for the Man Booker Prize and won the Scotiabank Giller Prize and Governor General’s Award.

— Sadiya Ansari

Love Medicine and One Song by Gregory Scofield (1997)

Years ago, when I first started writing, I came across Gregory Scofield’s gorgeous and spellbinding book of poetry Love Medicine and One Song. In these lush, celebratory poems, Scofield weaves tales of desire and interconnectedness — to the land, to those who have come before us, to each other. Written in Cree and English, these are poems that transcend human language and speak of the sacred bonds between all creatures, the thrumming energy that travels through all living beings. These are truthful poems of love and gratitude, of hunger and thirst, the miracle of a lover’s body. These are poems of silence, of bearing witness to the cycle of life and death, of being attuned to the rhythms of the universe that move through us like ecstatic secrets.

— Trevor Corkum

Already regarded as one of the country’s foremost poets when she published her debut novel twenty years ago, Dionne Brand’s In Another Place, Not Here has earned its place as one the most innovative and important Canadian books of the past few decades. Told through the lives of Verlia and Elizete, In Another Place, Not Here explores themes of political liberation, migration, and the tenuous diasporic threads connecting Toronto to the Caribbean islands. Brand’s prose is lush, and her narratives sweeping, covering the charged history of revolutionary Marxist, feminist, and Black liberation politics in 1970s Toronto. An important and critical study of the brutal underside of Toronto’s multicultural promise, in particular for racialized working class women, Brand’s novel is also fiercely queer, both in its political analysis and in its haunting and gorgeous explorations of female same-sex desire.

— Trevor Corkum

“They’re all dead now,” begins Ann-Marie MacDonald’s sprawling, epic first novel, a playful, harrowing jaunt through five generations of the Cape Breton Piper clan. Shape-shifting and extraordinary, MacDonald’s debut won accolades around the world for her virtuoso ability to spin a damn good tale. Following the peaks and valleys of the early twentieth century, Fall On Your Knees sets is sights on the First World War, the burgeoning New York jazz scene, and the boom and bust of coal country on mythic Cape Breton Island. Rife with sordid family secrets, shocking plot twists, and tragic romance, it’s a novel that also examines the invisible scars of intergenerational trauma and the grim, exploitative realities of the company town.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

— Trevor Corkum

Watson’s influential, onion skin of a novel is considered by many to be Canada’s first real foray into experimental modernism and it’s as confounding and intriguing today as it was when it was first published in the late fifties; perhaps more so, given that Canadian fiction has been dominated so long by serviceable but uninspired realism. A story of social collapse and redemption set in a remote B.C. community, it invokes murder, myth, and mayhem through language that conjures both the bible and Samuel Beckett. The resulting murk is part of the appeal; it’s good to get lost in the woods every once in a while.

— Emily Donaldson

From a Seaside Town by Norman Levine (1970)

In 1958, Ottawa-born Levine wrote a long, excoriating book about Canada that marginalized him in literary circles. Notwithstanding some fierce admirers, he remains underappreciated, despite being one of our best short-fiction writers. From a Seaside Town, his second and last novel, uses a brilliant, frugal blend of wit and wretchedness to tell the story of a Jewish-Canadian war vet and travel writer now living in an English seaside town. Out of work and money, he finds himself reluctantly grappling with events from his past, a crumbling marriage, and that most Canadian of preoccupations: his own identity.

— Emily Donaldson

Mavis Gallant considered the eponymous novella that anchors this book of post-Second World War-set stories to be her best, and it’s hard to disagree. It is told from the point of view of a young woman who, returning by train from Germany by to Paris with her insufferable fiancé and his spoiled child, imagines, or channels — it's not entirely clear which — the personal stories of the passengers around her. “Ernst In Civilian Clothes,” about two German ex-prisoners of war, one of which is about to be deported home from France, also stands out as a subtle feat of empathy and imagining.

— Emily Donaldson

Almost any title by Alice Munro would fit comfortably on a Canadian “must read” list, but Open Secrets, the author’s eighth book, gets my vote. Published in 1994, Open Secrets is the first of her great late-career quartet of story collections, in which Munro did nothing less than expand the boundaries and narrative possibilities of the contemporary short story form. Though all written in the “realist” mode, the collection’s eight stories seamlessly interweave the biographical facts of ordinary lives with fantasy, dream, rural legend, ghosts, bodily dismemberment, and Gothic romance.

— James Grainger

Thomas King’s ambitious novel remains stubbornly resistant to synopsis almost 25 years after its publication. A manically funny fusion of the oral and the written, as well as First Nations and European storytelling traditions, Green Grass, Running Waters tells four concurrent stories that loosely converge on the structure of a dam in rural Alberta. Along the way, King introduces readers to a cast of both wholly imagined characters often and such mythical figures as the trickster god Coyote, the Lone Ranger and Robinson Crusoe. Not nearly as highbrow as it sounds, and far funnier, the novel was also the inspiration for King’s much-beloved radio series, The Dead Dog Café.

— James Grainger

Who says CanLit can’t be as violent, gritty and bleakly funny as American and British fiction? Eden Robinson’s debut story collection introduced a unique literary sensibility to the world, one as influenced by the white-knuckled page-turning techniques of Stephen King and Elmore Leonard as the cultural traditions of the Haisla community in B.C. where the author was born and raised.

— James Grainger

Canada lost a literary treasure with the death this year of author Richard Wagamese. Even a work of fiction would be hard-pressed to match the heartbreaking yet inspirational story of Wagamese himself — from homeless youth to self-made cultural icon — his 1994 debut novel is a powerful preview of the master he would become. The story of Garnet Raven as he reconnects with his Ojibway family after being raised in foster care and jail, Keeper ’n Me is more than a little bit autobiographical and a poignant testament to the power of place.

— Dene Moore

Despite the headlines and a sweeping public inquiry, most Canadians still know little about residential schools and why they have had such an impact on the recent history of Indigenous people. Sellars’ personal memoir of her experience at St. Joseph’s Mission in the 1960s is a compelling account of the abuse and its lifelong consequences. It is also an ultimately hopeful account, given that Sellars overcame the trauma to earn a law degree and become chief of her community.

— Dene Moore

Stunning and stark, the debut novel of Manitoba Métis poet Vermette is a glimpse into the effects of the intergenerational trauma of residential schools, racism and poverty. It is also a tribute to the strength and spirit of Aboriginal women who have survived and thrived in spite of it all. Centred around a violent rape in the Aboriginal neighbourhood of Winnipeg’s North End, the novel explores the issue of violence against Aboriginal women, in its many forms.

— Dene Moore