3.71 avg rating — 2,320 ratings

"Winner of the 1988 Arthur Ellis Award for crime-writing, Swann attempts to puzzle together the life of fictional poet Mary Swann whose writing was only discovered after her violent death. Told from the perspective of Swann’s biographer, a Swann academic, a librarian and a small-town newspaper editor, the story’s climax takes place at a Mary Swann symposium where the characters (and their separate perceptions of who the artist was) finally meet face-to-face. "

3.93 avg rating — 510 ratings

"A good book proves too enveloping, literally transporting its young reader into the fictional realm where the boy is made a character and embarks upon a mythical adventure. At the same time, his father is on an analogous quest to discover the book’s magic spell, keep the book out of enemy hands (including those of unscrupulous publishing types), and to find the key to reversing the spell and returning his boy to reality. "

3.80 avg rating — 260 ratings

"Donna Tartt meets Chuck Pahlahniuk in this very funny novel about disgruntled big-box bookstore employees who burn bad books in their off hours in order to save their souls and save the world. Things get out of control, however, when a messianic talk show host with a book club is kidnapped, protagonist Thomas delivering his story in missives while still on the run from the law. The big-box store is not quite Indigo, and the talk-show host isn’t Oprah either, which means that although the story may sound familiar, it’s original enough to have legs of its own. "

3.65 avg rating — 451 ratings

"A book that is aware it’s a book, albeit a book comprising a series of incident reports documented in a workplace. But there is nothing ordinary about these incidents, because that workplace is a downtown library, with the eccentric cast of characters inevitable in such a setting. It’s a quirky premise, but in Baillie’s capable hands, the incidents culminate to create a gripping, moving story with remarkable depth. "

3.50 avg rating — 5,080 ratings

"Three characters end up in Montreal, loosely linked by blood ties and a strange “three-headed book.” Their barely-intersections are filled out by fish, pirates, serendipitous bookshop scenes, various islands and rising water. Dickner performs strange and wonderful feats with parallels and opposites: wheat fields and oceans, the Aleutians and the West Indies, orphans and their ancestors, all of them dreaming of nomads and home. A most fitting champion for Canada Reads 2010. "

3.67 avg rating — 15,530 ratings

"Joan Foster has two bookish secrets: the collection of feminist poetry she’s just published and become famous for was composed via automatic writing, and also she’s long been publishing gothic romance novels under a nom de plume. Lady Oracle opens with Joan faking her own death to make matters simpler, and then proceeds back through the web of lies that is her past with a twisting and turning plot examining the role of the woman artist. "

3.86 avg rating — 1,642 ratings

"On a winter’s day at the Toronto Reference Library, Lilah Kemp inadvertently sets Kurtz free from page 93 of Heart of Darkness, unleashing a monster upon the city. The novel is never clear about whether Lilah is suffering from another of her delusions or if her visions are reality, either being plausible in Findley’s dystopian Toronto, which is ruled by dark forces and in which starlings have begun to be exterminated en masse in order to contain a dangerous bird flu. "

4.31 avg rating — 55,248 ratings

"Similarities to Lady Oracle are too glaring to be coincidental, and it’s no wonder that this book made an impression of Margaret Atwood. When mousey Valancy Stirling learns she has months to live, she throws off the shackles of her horrid family and marries local eccentric Barney Snaith. Valancy’s fate is not what she imagines, however, and neither is Barney, who turns out to be the real-life identity of Valancy’s favourite novelist, John Foster. "