2021 Summer Reading Guide

Titanic. When the “unsinkable” ship hit an iceberg and sank off the coast of Atlantic Canada, 1,500 people died, while just 750 survived. This book tells the stories of their lives and shines a spotlight on Titanic’s lost treasures, its celebrated send-off from Belfast, its animal passengers, the iconic music and movies inspired by the story, and the many, many tales of heroism and bravery that arose from this tragedy.

Buy this book at Chapters-Indigo

When The Practice of Cookery first appeared in Edinburgh and London editions in 1829, reviewers hailed it as one of the best cookbooks available. Catherine Emily Callbeck Dalgairns Though her contemporaries understood Catherine Emily Callbeck Dalgairns to be a Scottish author, she lived her first twenty-two years in Prince Edward Island. In Mrs Dalgairns’s Kitchen, Mary Williamson reclaims Dalgairns and her book’s Canadian roots.

Buy this book at Chapter-Indigo

Kazim Ali’s earliest memories are of Jenpeg, a temporary town in northern Manitoba where his immigrant father worked on the construction of a hydroelectric dam. Northern Light recounts Ali’s return to Pimicikamak as an adult, learning of the environmental and social impact of the Jenpeg dam.

Buy this book at Chapters-Indigo

From the establishment of Fort Victoria, B.C.’s capital city has had a long history of prostitution. But little has been written on the lives of the women themselves — some of the most enterprising women in Victoria’s past. Instead, these women’s stories have been relegated to judgmental newspaper headlines. Now historian Linda J. Eversole takes a deeper look at their lives, from the mid-nineteenth century to the First World War and the Moral Reform movement.

Buy this book at Chapters-Indigo

This beautifully illustrated book, now available in paperback, is a compelling and even-handed account of the races, the ships, and their larger-than-life skippers. It is the definitive story of the Bluenose and how the schooner won the hearts of mariners around the world. Available from The Nautical Mind — www.nauticalmind.com

Buy this book at Chapters-Indigo

Hailed as the most sweeping history of African-Canadians ever written when it first appeared, The Blacks in Canada remains the only historical survey that covers all aspects of the Black experience in Canada, from the introduction of slavery in 1628 to the first wave of Caribbean immigration in the 1950s and 1960s.

Buy this book at Chapters-Indigo

Since the late nineteenth century, Niagara Falls has been heavily engineered to generate energy behind a flowing façade designed to appeal to tourists. Fixing Niagara Falls reveals the technological feats and cross-border politics that facilitated the transformation of one of the most important natural sites in North America.

Buy this book at Chapters-Indigo

Almost everywhere we turn, and any way we look at it, the canoe both affects and is affected by complex political and cultural histories. The essays in this volume show that canoes can enhance how we engage with and interpret not only our physical environments, but also our histories and present-day societies.

Buy this book at Chapters-Indigo

The baby boomers and postwar suburbia remain a touchstone. For many, there is a belief that it has never been as good for youngsters and their families as it was in the postwar years. Boom Kids explores the triumphs and challenges of childhood and adolescence in Calgary’s postwar suburbs.

Buy this book at Chapters-Indigo

In Snowton, Alberta, secrets flourish like the crocuses in spring. When Louise Till lets herself into a neighbour’s home using a surreptitiously copied key, she discovers more than she ever wanted to know about her small town and herself. This gripping novella from award-winning author Amy Leblanc is a poignant exploration of grief, family, and community infused with quiet humour.

Buy this book at Chapters-Indigo

In The Uncomfortable Pew Bruce Douville explores the relationship between Christianity and the New Left in English Canada from 1959 to 1975. Focusing primarily on Toronto, he examines the impact that left-wing student radicalism had on Canada’s largest Christian denominations and the role that Christianity played in shaping Canada’s New Left.

Buy this book at Chapters-Indigo

Can a critical examination of Indigenous masculinities be an honour song — one that celebrates rather than pathologizes? Can a critical examination of Indigenous masculinities be creative, inclusive, erotic? Carrying the Burden of Peace answers affirmatively, exploring Indigenous literary art for understandings of masculinity that exceed the impoverished inheritance of colonialism.

Buy this book at Chapters-Indigo

From pre-contact Indigenous trading through 1939, Thinking Big examines the history of businesses, business leaders, and organizations in Winnipeg. Discover how the Winnipeg business community dealt with challenges such as the Great Depression and the post-First World War depression and organized itself to take advantage of periods of growth and prosperity.

Buy this book at Chapters-Indigo

World trade was revolutionized in the 19th century when ships went from sail to steam. The PS Royal William of Quebec steamed from Pictou, Nova Scotia, to Portsmouth, England, in 1833, the first vessel to span the Atlantic under steam. Other ships and countries challenged that claim, whence the “Royal William controversy.” Eileen Reid Marcil lays the controversy to rest.

Buy this book at Chapters-Indigo

Thousands of Canadian women, military and civilian, served in the war zones of northern Europe, the Middle East, the Balkans and Russia — nursing soldiers with lungs seared by poison gas, fighting typhus in Serbia, driving ambulances, aiding soldiers’ convalescence, entertaining the troops. Dianne Graves describes a Canadian contribution in the First World War that deserves to be celebrated.

Buy this book at Chapters-Indigo

Combining archival research and interviews with Molly’s diaries and letters, acclaimed author Nathan M. Greenfield brings to light the private and public lives of two of the most important figures in 20^th-century Canadian art: Molly Lamb and Bruno Bobak.

Buy this book at Chapters-Indigo

Daughters of Aataentsic highlights and connects the unique lives of seven Wendat/Wandat women whose legacies are still felt today. Spanning the continent and the colonial borders of New France, British North America, Canada, and the United States, this book shows how Wendat people and place came together in Ontario, Quebec, Michigan, Ohio, Kansas, and Oklahoma, and how generations of activism became intimately tied with notions of family, community, motherwork, and legacy from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century.

Buy this book at Chapters-Indigo

A comprehensive, fully illustrated biography of Nova Scotia’s Somebeachsomewhere, the greatest standardbred pacer of all time, from the award-winning author of Year of the Horse.

Buy this book at Chapters-Indigo

“Delightfully capturing the joy of family, friendship and community like a warm hug. A Love Letter to Africville gives us a small glimpse of what is truly important about the people of Africville.”

— Juanita Peters, Manager, Africville Museum

Buy this book at Chapters-Indigo

“Together, Linda and Paul set up competing stories of Canada as they try to relate to the land and its complex past, as well as to each other. ‘History. You can’t live without it,’ Linda’s father used to say. Of course, living holds the true meaning.”

— L. Krotz, Literary Review of Canada

Buy this book at Chapters-Indigo

Craigdarroch Castle, built by coal baron Robert Dunsmuir for his wife, Joan, and their family, was completed in 1890. Following Joan’s death, the castle was put up for sale in 1908, and it later housed a military hospital and the nascent University of Victoria. Told in 21 objects — including furnishings, artwork, and tools — this approachable museum guide takes readers into the family history, local lore, and oddities of one of Victoria’s most famous landmarks.

Buy this book at Chapters-Indigo

In the 1950s, the causal link between smoking and lung cancer surfaced in medical journals and mainstream media. Yet the best years for the Canadian cigarette industry were still to come, as per capita cigarette consumption rose steadily in the 1960s and 1970s. In Cigarette Nation, Daniel Robinson examines the vibrant and contentious history of smoking to discover why Canadians continued to light up despite the publicized health risks.

Buy this book at Chapters-Indigo

This heartfelt narrative, profusely illustrated with historical images and detailed captions, chronicles highlights in the life of Ralph Douglas Clark, whose career as an Atlantic telegraph cable operator began in the tiny Nova Scotia seaport of Canso before taking him to Panama, Ottawa, the Western Front in 1916, Halifax, Miami and Montreal. A vital addition to the library of anyone interested in a rural, seaside childhood, military history, and telecommunications.

Buy this book at Chapters-Indigo

The Warming Huts are a public art and architecture installation held annually at midwinter on the major rivers of Winnipeg. The huts are selected through an international design competition and via the invitation of selected designers or artists. This book, published to coincide with the tenth anniversary, celebrates and discusses the project as a critical body of work foregrounding the poetics and politics of public space.

Buy this book at Chapters-Indigo

Failed by her school, the police, and the mental health system, Rehtaeh Parsons attempted suicide on April 4, 2013. She died three days later. This book, written by her father, Glen Canning, offers an unsparing look at Rehtaeh’s story, the social forces that enable and perpetuate violence and misogyny among teenagers, and parental love in the midst of horrendous loss.

Buy this book at Chapters-Indigo

The bestselling biography of renowned Japanese translator of Anne of Green Gables is available in English for the first time. The name Hanako Muraoka is revered in Japan. Her Japanese translation of L. M. Montgomery’s beloved children’s classic Anne of Green Gables, Akage no An (Redhaired Anne) was the catalyst for the book’s massive and enduring popularity in Japan.

Buy this book at Chapters-Indigo

The personal journals examined in Reading the Diaries of Henry Trent are not the witty, erudite, and gracefully written exercises that have drawn the attention of most biographers and literary scholars. Prosaic, ungrammatical, and poorly spelled, the fifteen surviving volumes of Henry Trent’s hitherto unexamined diaries are nevertheless a treasure for the social and cultural historian.

Buy this book at Chapters-Indigo

Robert Boschman grew up in a coin laundromat sandwiched between a residential school and a jail in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. White Coal City is a story of family trauma, palpable but never spoken of. The devastating fate of a grandmother killed by a hit-and-run driver while she was six months pregnant is gently shared through letters, journal entries, newspaper clippings, and accounts from the coroner’s inquest.

Buy this book at Chapters-Indigo

This adventure story is also a meticulously researched biography of two ships that performed legendary service in the perilous climate of the Canadian Arctic. Featuring fascinating characters, thrilling sea voyages, raucous whaling towns and daring escapes from dangerous ice conditions. Available from The Nautical Mind — www.nauticalmind.com

Buy this book at Chapters-Indigo

In Reliving the Trenches, three plays written by returned soldiers who served in the Great War with the Canadian Expeditionary Force in France and Belgium appear in print for the first time. With a critical introduction that references the authors’ service files to establish the plays as memoirs, these plays are an important addition to Canadian literature of the Great War.

Buy this book at Chapters-Indigo

In Inequality in Canada Eric Sager considers one of the defining — but hardest to define — ideas of our era and traces its different meanings and contexts across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Sager shows how the idea of inequality arose in the long evolution in Britain and the United States from classical economics to the emerging welfare economics of the twentieth century.

Buy this book at Chapters-Indigo

By virtue of resources and technologies Canada is a nuclear nation. But the country does not have the ultimate symbol of nuclear power — a weapons program of its own. Since the first atomic weapon was detonated in 1945, Canadians have debated not only the role of nuclear power in their uranium-rich land but also their country’s role in a nuclear world.

Buy this book at Chapters-Indigo

Robert Coutts brings his many years of experience as a Parks Canada historian to this detailed examination of heritage sites across the prairies. He shows how the process of commemoration often reflects social and cultural perspectives that privilege a confident and progressive national narrative.

Buy this book at Chapters-Indigo

The twenty-first century has seen a rise in tourism, with people travelling the world in greater numbers than ever before. While the world’s global cities face issues of social and cultural sustainability, small cities and rural communities face the loss of traditional industries. Creative Tourism in Smaller Communities offers a bold new vision for the future of tourism worldwide, from British Columbia to Northern Canada and beyond.

Buy this book at Chapters-Indigo

The quarter century that followed the end of the Second World War was marked by intense social and economic transformation. Hall-Dennis and the Road to Utopia explores this moment of renewal through a powerful and influential education reform project: 1968’s Living and Learning: The Report of the Provincial Committee on Aims and Objectives of Education in the Schools of Ontario.

Buy this book at Chapters-Indigo

In Grant Buday’s new novel, three captivating stories intertwine at the site of the New Brighton Hotel on the shores of Burrard Inlet. Endearing, funny, and highly evocative of time and place, Orphans of Empire celebrates those living in the shadow of history’s supposed heroes, their private struggles and personal agendas. Readers who loved Michael Crummey’s Galore and Eowyn Ivey’s To the Bright Edge of the World will love this vivid novel of arrivals that prods at the ethics of settlement.

Buy this book at Chapters-Indigo

In this authorized biography, veteran author Stephen Kimber chronicles Alexa’s life and political career, weaving a narrative of the changing attitudes towards women in politics. A no-holds-barred look at Canada’s most consequential female leader.

Buy this book at Chapters-Indigo

For fans of Tuesdays with Morrie, a memoir of friendship in the face of memory loss and of preserving one man’s story of an incredible year aboard the replica HMS Bounty. In 1960, Roy Boutilier and twenty-four fellow Nova Scotians set sail for Tahiti aboard the newly built replica sailing ship Bounty. The ship stayed in Tahiti for almost a year while MGM Studios filmed the epic historical drama Mutiny on the Bounty, starring Marlon Brando.

Buy this book at Chapters-Indigo

No other figure, historical or political, features more prominently in recent Newfoundland history than Joey Smallwood. There are multiple J.R. Smallwoods, but the aspiring and ambitious figure presented in this biography stands apart.

Buy this book at Chapters-Indigo

Published to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the First World War, Canada’s Great War Album is an unprecedented and remarkable collection of Canadian photographs, memorabilia, and stories of the war. Includes contributions from Peter Mansbridge, Charlotte Gray, J.L. Granatstein, Christopher Moore, Jonathan Vance, and Tim Cook.

Buy this book from Canada’s History