The best Canadian nonfiction of 2023
Here are the CBC Books picks for the top Canadian nonfiction of the year!
There Is No Blue by Martha Baillie
There Is No Blue is a memoir comprised of three essays about three significant losses Martha Baillie experienced. It's a response to the death of her mother, father and sister along as ruminations on what made them so alive.
Baillie is a Toronto-based author. Her novel The Incident Report was on the 2009 Giller Prize longlist and is being made into a film. Her other books include Sister Language and The Search for Heinrich Schlögel.
The Definition of Beautiful by Charlotte Bellows
In The Definition of Beautiful, Charlotte Bellows writes her own coming-of-age story. Between the ages of 15 and 17, she had to recover from an eating disorder, and explores this journey along with all the consequences it had brought into her life, during a global pandemic.
Bellows is a high school student in Calgary. The Definition of Beautiful is her first book.
An Anthology of Monsters by Cherie Dimaline
Cherie Dimaline explores her life-long experience with anxiety and how the stories we tell ourselves can help us reshape the ways in which we think, cope and survive in An Anthology of Monsters. She uses examples from her books, her mère and her own life to reveal how to collect and curate stories to elicit difficult and beautiful conversations. She also reflects on how family and community can be a source of strength and a place of refuge.
Dimaline is a bestselling Métis author best known for her YA novel The Marrow Thieves. The Marrow Thieves, was named one of Time magazine's top 100 YA novels of all time and was championed by Jully Black on Canada Reads 2018. Her other books include VenCo, Red Rooms, The Girl Who Grew a Galaxy, A Gentle Habit and Empire of Wild.
Truth Telling by Michelle Good
Truth Telling is a collection of seven personal essays that explore a wide range of issues affecting Indigenous people in Canada today, including reconciliation, the rise of Indigenous literature in the 1970s and the impact it has to this day, the emergence of "pretendians" and more.
Good is a Cree writer and retired lawyer, as well as a member of Red Pheasant Cree Nation in Saskatchewan. Five Little Indians, her first book, won the 2020 Governor General's Literary Award for fiction and the 2021 Amazon Canada First Novel Award. It also won Canada Reads 2022, when it was championed by Ojibway fashion journalist Christian Allaire.
Message in a Bottle by Holly Hogan
Message in a Bottle is a story about the central threat to marine life diversity: ocean plastic. In this book, biologist and writer Holly Hogan brings marine creatures to life as she recounts experiences on her 30 years of ocean travel.
Hogan is an author and wildlife biologist who lives in St. John's.
Races by Valerie Jerome
The Jerome family have an historic record in Canadian sports, with the grandfather being the country's first Black Olympian and siblings Harry and Valerie also competing and setting world records in the 1960s. In the book Races, Valerie Jerome details those heroic moments for her family and the nation, that came alongside the racism they simultaneously had to face.
Valerie Jerome is the granddaughter of Canada's first Black Olympian John "Army" Howard and a Canadian Olympian herself. She has previously represented the Green Party of British Columbia and her work in conservation garnered her a 125th Anniversary of the Confederation of Canada Medal and a City of Vancouver Heritage Award.
Doppelganger by Naomi Klein
In Doppelganger, Naomi Klein explores the concept of Mirror World. This includes the presence of far right movements and how they attempt to appeal to the working class, anti-vaxxers, implications of artificial intelligence in content curation and the additional identities that we create on social media. Through referencing thinkers such as Sigmund Freud and bell hooks, Klein also connects to greater social themes to share how one can break free from the Mirror World.
Klein is a Montreal-born journalist, bestselling author, political thinker and advocate. She is associate professor in geography at the University of British Columbia, and the author of This Changes Everything, The Shock Doctrine, No Logo, No Is Not Enough and On Fire.
Becoming a Matriarch by Helen Knott
Becoming a Matriarch is a memoir that delves into Helen Knott's experience after losing both her mother and grandmother in just over six months. It spans themes of mourning, sobriety through loss, and generational dreaming and explores what it truly means to be a matriarch.
Knott is a Dane Zaa, Nehiyaw, Métis and mixed Euro-descent writer from Prophet River First Nations. She is a 2019 RBC Taylor Prize Emerging author. She is also the author of the memoir In My Own Moccasins, which won the Saskatchewan Book Award for Indigenous Peoples' Publishing.
Superfan by Jen Sookfong Lee
Superfan explores Jen Sookfong Lee's lifelong love affair with pop culture. Using pop culture as an escape from family tragedy and to fit in with those around her, as Lee grew up she realized that pop culture was not made for the child of Chinese immigrants. Superfan connects key moments in pop culture with Lee's own stories as an Asian woman, single mother and writer.
Jen Sookfong Lee is a Vancouver-born novelist, broadcast personality, a past CBC Short Story Prize juror, a former Canada Reads panellist and a columnist on The Next Chapter. She is the author of the novel The Conjoined, the nonfiction book Gentleman of the Shade and the poetry collection The Shadow List.
My Effin' Life by Geddy Lee
My Effin' Life is the long-awaited memoir from Rush bassist Geddy Lee. He writes candidly about his childhood, the history of the Canadian band Rush and their success after some struggles early on, as well as intimate stories about his friends and bandmates Alex Lifeson and Neil Peart.
Lee is the vocalist, bassist, and keyboard player for the group Rush, with drummer Neil Peart and guitarist Alex Lifeson. Lee was ranked by Rolling Stone as one of the top bassists of all time. Lee is also the author of Geddy Lee's Big Beautiful Book of Bass.
Unearthing by Kyo Maclear
After Kyo Maclear's father dies, a DNA test shows that she is not biologically related to the father that raised her. Maclear embarks on a journey to unravel the family mystery and uncover the story of her biological father, raising questions about kinship and what it means to be family in Unearthing.
Unearthing won the 2023 Governor General's Literary Award for nonfiction.
Maclear is an essayist, novelist and children's author. Her books have been translated into 15 languages, won a Governor General's Literary Award and been nominated for the TD Canadian Children's Literature Award, among others. Her memoir Birds Art Life was a finalist for the 2017 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction and won the 2018 Trillium Book Award.
Pageboy by Elliot Page
Elliot Page shares his personal journey from the massive success of Juno to discovering his queerness and identity as a trans person, while navigating criticism and abuse from some of the most powerful people in Hollywood. Pageboy is filled with behind-the-scenes details and interrogations on sex, love and trauma. It's a story about what it means to free ourselves from the expectations of others and step into our truth with defiance, strength and joy.
Page is an Academy Award-nominated actor, producer and director. He currently stars in the hit TV-series The Umbrella Academy. Pageboy is his first book.
On Community by Casey Plett
Casey Plett writes about the implications of community as a word, an idea and a symbol in the book-length essay On Community. Plett uses her firsthand experiences to eventually reach a cumulative definition of community and explore how we form bonds with one another.
Plett is the author of A Dream of a Woman, Little Fish, A Safe Girl to Love. She is a winner of the Amazon First Novel Award, the Firecracker Award for Fiction and a two-time winner of the Lambda Literary Award. Her work has also been nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Plett splits her time between New York City and Windsor, Ont.
Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe
Ordinary Notes reflects on questions about Black life in the wake of loss. Christina Sharpe brings together the past and present realities with possible futures to construct a portrait of everyday Black existence. The book touches on language, beauty, memory, art, photography and literature.
Ordinary Notes won the 2023 Writers' Trust Hilary Weston Prize for nonfiction.
Sharpe is a writer and professor. She is also the author of In the Wake: On Blackness and Being and Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects. Sharpe is the Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the department of humanities, at York University, in Toronto.
Unbroken by Angela Sterritt
In her memoir Unbroken, Angela Sterritt shares her story from navigating life on the streets to becoming an award-winning journalist. As a teenager, she wrote in her notebook to survive. Now, she reports on cases of missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada, showing how colonialism and racism create a society where Indigenous people are devalued. Unbroken is a story about courage and strength against all odds.
Unbroken was shortlisted for the 2023 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize.
Sterritt is a journalist, writer and artist. She has previously worked as a host and reporter with CBC Vancouver. Sterritt is a member of the Gitxsan Nation and lives on Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh territories in Vancouver.
Skid Dogs by Emelia Symington-Fedy
Skid Dogs is a first-hand account of what it was like being an unsupervised and wild girl in a small town in the 1990s. Emelia Symington-Fedy recalls her teenage years after coming home two decades later and following the murder of an 18-year-old girl on the same tracks that she used to hang out at as a kid.
Symington-Fedy is an essayist, storyteller and documentary producer. She is the creator of the blog and radio show that became an audiobook, Trying to Be Good: The Healing Powers of Lying, Cheating, Stealing, and Drugs. She grew up in Armstrong, B.C. and currently lives in Shuswap, B.C.
The Age of Insecurity by Astra Taylor
Writer and filmmaker Astra Taylor delivers the 2023 Massey Lectures in The Age of Insecurity. She explores the pervasive insecurity in our current reality and how the institutions that promise to make us more secure actually contribute to this feeling. Throughout the book, Taylor argues that embracing this vulnerability is the key to more caring, sustainable notions of security.
Taylor is a writer, filmmaker and political organizer who was born in Winnipeg and currently lives in New York. Her other books include The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age and Remake the World: Essays, Reflections, Rebellions.
Landbridge by Y-Dang Troeung
In her memoir Landbridge: Life in Fragments, Y-Dang Troeung wrote about the transactional relationship host countries have with the refugees they admit. Troeung herself was only one-year-old when she came to Canada from Cambodia fleeing Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge regime. The book also explores the complex ethnic, regional and national identities of family legacies and how they are passed down to the next generation.
Troeung was a researcher, writer and assistant professor of English at the University of British Columbia. Her first book, Refugee Lifeworlds: The Afterlife of the Cold War in Cambodia, explored the enduring impact of war, genocide and displacement. She died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 42 in 2022.
Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast by John Vaillant
Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast delves into the events surrounding the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire, the multi-billion-dollar disaster that melted vehicles, turned entire neighbourhoods into firebombs and drove 88,000 people from their homes in a single afternoon.
Fire Weather was shortlisted for the 2023 Writers' Trust Hilary Weston nonfiction award and won the Baillie Gifford Prize for nonfiction.
John Vaillant is a Vancouver-based freelance writer, novelist and nonfiction author. His first book, The Golden Spruce, which told the story of a rare tree and the man who cut it down, won the 2005 Governor General's Literary Award for nonfiction. Vaillant's second title The Tiger was a contender on Canada Reads 2012.
