RankedFiction

The Best Canadian Novels Ever Written

Ranked on the reading experience first: does it grip, does it stay with you, and would you press it into a friend's hands. Influence and prizes (Booker, Giller, Governor General's) are noted but did not set the order. One book per author to keep the list wide. For readers building a Canadian shelf, book clubs, and anyone who only read one of these in high school.

A community-ranked list on FindBest — currently in the creator's order; no member votes yet. Votes change the order: when members vote, the list is ordered by their votes. How ranking works.

SSofia Marino

13 entriesAdded Oct 17, 2026

The podium

— the creator's order — no votes yet

13 entries

Sort

The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood

Atwood's 1985 novel of Gilead, a theocracy where fertile women are assigned to bear children for the ruling class, won the Governor General's Award and is more widely read now than when it came out. Offred's voice, wry and frightened, is what the TV adaptation could never fully capture. The 2019 sequel The Testaments shared the Booker.

4 pros · 2 cons

Fifth Business - Robertson Davies

A snowball with a stone in it, thrown in a small Ontario town in 1908, sets off sixty years of guilt, saints, magic and Jungian mischief. The 1970 opener of the Deptford Trilogy is narrated by a schoolmaster writing to his headmaster. Witty, learned and hugely entertaining.

4 pros · 2 cons

Life of Pi - Yann Martel

A boy from Pondicherry, a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker and 227 days on a lifeboat. Martel's 2001 novel won the 2002 Booker Prize and sold in the millions. The ending asks which story you prefer, which is why people still argue about it. Ang Lee's 2012 film won four Oscars.

4 pros · 2 cons

A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

Toronto-based Mistry's 1995 novel follows four strangers sharing a cramped Bombay flat during India's Emergency in the 1970s. It won the Giller Prize and was a Booker finalist. Devastating and also funny, with characters you will think about for years. Long, and worth every page.

4 pros · 2 cons

The English Patient - Michael Ondaatje

Four damaged people in a ruined Italian villa at the end of the Second World War, one of them a burned man with a past in the North African desert. Ondaatje's 1992 novel shared the Booker and in 2018 won the Golden Man Booker, voted best of the prize's first 50 years. Lyrical, fragmentary, rewarding.

4 pros · 2 cons

Fall on Your Knees - Ann-Marie MacDonald

A Cape Breton family saga across the early 20th century, from coal towns to New York jazz clubs, built around four sisters and their father's terrible secrets. The 1996 debut won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for best first book and was an Oprah's Book Club pick in 2002. Gothic, propulsive, hard to put down.

4 pros · 2 cons

Station Eleven - Emily St. John Mandel

B.C.-raised Mandel's 2014 novel follows a travelling Shakespeare company twenty years after a flu pandemic, threaded with the life of an actor who died on stage the night it began. Hopeful where most post-apocalyptic fiction is grim. It won the Arthur C. Clarke Award; the 2021 HBO Max series is excellent too.

4 pros · 2 cons

The Stone Angel - Margaret Laurence

Hagar Shipley, ninety and furious, looks back on her life in the prairie town of Manawaka while her son plans to put her in a home. Laurence's 1964 novel is a fixture of school syllabuses, and adults rereading it are often stunned. Hagar may be the greatest character in Canadian fiction.

4 pros · 2 cons

Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler

Barney Panofsky, a cantankerous Montreal TV producer accused of murdering his best friend decades ago, sets the record straight, badly. Richler's final novel won the 1997 Giller Prize. Scabrously funny, sad at the end, and the definitive novel of Anglo Montreal.

4 pros · 2 cons

Indian Horse - Richard Wagamese

Saul Indian Horse, an Ojibwe boy taken to a residential school in northern Ontario, finds escape in hockey and a gift for seeing the game before it happens, until racism and his memories close in. Wagamese's 2012 novel is spare and powerful, and was adapted as a 2017 film.

4 pros · 2 cons

Washington Black - Esi Edugyan

An 11-year-old enslaved boy on a Barbados sugar plantation escapes in a hot-air balloon with his owner's eccentric scientist brother, beginning a journey to the Arctic, Nova Scotia and London. Edugyan's 2018 novel won the Giller Prize; her second Giller after Half-Blood Blues.

4 pros · 2 cons

Moon of the Crusted Snow - Waubgeshig Rice

A northern Anishinaabe community loses power and contact with the south as winter sets in, and then a stranger arrives. Rice's 2018 novel is a slow-burn thriller that inverts the apocalypse: the community has already survived the end of one world. A 2023 sequel, Moon of the Turning Leaves, continues it.

4 pros · 2 cons

Anne of Green Gables - L. M. Montgomery

An orphan with red hair and a big vocabulary is sent by mistake to a P.E.I. brother and sister who wanted a boy. Published in 1908 and in print ever since, translated into dozens of languages and a pilgrimage site in Cavendish. Funnier and sharper than its reputation as a children's book suggests.

4 pros · 2 cons

Missing something?

Suggest an entry. The FindBest editors check every suggestion against a source before it goes on the list, and you will see what happened to it here.

Discussions

No discussions on this list yet.

Related lists· more in Fiction

See all in Fiction