The Tin Flute, Gabrielle Roy’s first novel, is a classic of Canadian fiction. Imbued with Roy’s unique brand of compassion and compelling understanding, this moving story focuses on a family in the Saint-Henri slums of Montreal, its struggles to overcome poverty and ignorance, and its search for love. An affecting story of familial tenderness, sacrifice, and survival during the Second World War, The Tin Flute won both the Governor General’s Award and the Prix Fémina of France. The novel was made into a critically acclaimed motion picture in 1983.

The Tin Flute: Penguin Modern Classics Edition

Literature & Fiction

Roy, Gabrielle

Literary

Emblem Editions

NOW A PENGUIN MODERN CLASSIC: Twining revenge tragedy with gothic romance, John Richardson's Wacousta is a story of betrayal, false identity, and wasted love during one of the most violent episodes in the history of the Canadian frontier. On the northwest frontier in 1763, a mysterious man named Wacousta lies at the heart of a violent attack on the British garrison Fort Detroit. Consumed by a thirst for vengeance that borders on madness, this monstrous figure assists Pontiac's Indian alliance to satisfy a deeply personal vendetta--one whose roots stretch back across decades and continents. Thrilling and suspenseful, Wacousta creates a world of deception and terror in which motive is ambiguous and the boundary between order and anarchy unclear.

Wacousta: Penguin Modern Classics Edition

Richardson,John

Told with wit, spontaneity, and candour, Susanna Moodie's account of life on a backwoods farm captures an important part of Canadian history, now available as a Penguin Modern Classic. Roughing It in the Bush chronicles Susanna Moodie's harsh and often humorous experiences homesteading in the woods of Upper Canada. She describes a life of backbreaking labour, poverty, and hardship on a pioneer farm in the colonial wilderness. Her sharp observations, satirical character sketches, and moments of despair and terror were a startling contrast to the widely circulated optimistic portrayals of life in British North America, written to entice readers across the Atlantic. A frank and fascinating account of how one woman coped, not only with a new world, but with a new self, this unabridged text continues to justify the international sensation it caused when it was first published in 1852.

Roughing It in the Bush: Penguin Modern Classics Edition (New Canadian Library)

Biographies & Memoirs

Moodie, Susanna

Arts & Literature

The Sacrifice is a haunting depiction of one family and its often tragic attempts to come to terms with a new life in a new country. It is a moving, almost biblical story of a father possessed by his hope for his only son; of a son who rebels against his father’s ideals, yet sacrifices himself to preserve what his father most prizes; and of a grandson who must reconcile the flaws in his inheritance.

The Sacrifice: Penguin Modern Classics Edition

Wiseman, Adele

The Fire-Dwellers: Penguin Modern Classics Edition

LAURENCE, Margaret

Genre Fiction

Hugh MacLennan's first novel is a compelling romance set against the horrors of wartime and the catastrophic Halifax Explosion of December 6, 1917, now available as a Penguin Modern Classic. In the winter of 1917, Penelope Wain is convinced her love, Neil Macrae, is dead--killed in action while serving overseas. That he apparently died in disgrace does not alter her love for the soldier who, unbeknownst to her, has returned to Halifax to clear his name, only days before a catastrophic explosion in the Harbour will forever change their lives.

Barometer Rising: Penguin Modern Classics Edition

MacLennan, Hugh

Affectionately combining both the idyllic and ironic, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town is a colourful, imaginative, and thoroughly entertaining portrait of small town Ontario. This is Stephen Leacock at his best--now available as a Penguin Modern Classic. Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, which first appeared as a newspaper serial, chronicles life in the fictional community of Mariposa, modelled on Orillia, Ontario, where Stephen Leacock spent many summers. It's a brilliant satire about small towns, small-town people, and small-town occurrences. Life in Mariposa is never dull or ordinary. It's a town full of eccentrics, where boats sent to rescue passengers from a sinking steamer have to be rescued themselves, where the leading citizen is a 280-pound illiterate saloonkeeper, and where a barber who stumbles into a fortune is heralded as a financial wizard.

Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town: Penguin Modern Classics Edition

Leacock,Stephen

Humor & Satire

As For Me and My House is an essential Canadian work--a precise and compelling portrait of our culture, our psyche, and the nature of contemporary art itself, now available as a Penguin Modern Classic. In the windswept town of Horizon, an unamed diarist paints a vivid and enthralling picture of prairie life in the Depression era. Atmospheric, intimate, and richly observed, As For Me and My House is a moving meditation on the bittersweet nature of human relationships, on the bonds that tie people together and the undercurrents of feeling that can tear them apart. It is one of Canada's great novels and a landmark in modern fiction.

As for Me and My House: Penguin Modern Classics Edition

Ross, Sinclair

Sinclair Ross’ 1941 novel As For Me and My House is a masterpiece of Canadian literature, a stunning evocation of the Prairies and their inhabitants during the Depression of the Thirties. With The Lamp at Noon and Other Stories, an original New Canadian Library collection, Ross reveals further dimensions of his fictional universe. A woman’s impulsive infidelity leads to tragedy. A sudden hailstorm destroys hope. A boy learns to conquer a beautiful wild horse. A little girl dreams about a circus. Against the isolated, haunting landscapes of summer droughts and winter blizzards, the men and women of Ross’ stories grapple with fate against almost impossible odds. Marked by a legacy of pride that will not suffer defeat, Ross’ unyielding characters are cut off from their loved ones by obstinacy and defiance. Their tragedy is not that they suffer, but that they suffer alone. The sensitivity, compassion, and subtlety with which Ross portrays human aspirations and failings remain to this day unequalled in Canadian fiction.

The Lamp at Noon and Other Stories: Penguin Modern Classics Edition (New Canadian Library)

"We have doomed the wolf not for what it is, but for what we deliberately and mistakenly perceive it to be--the mythologized epitome of a savage, ruthless killer--which is, in reality, no more than the reflected image of ourself." --from the new Preface\nNever Cry Wolf is a brilliant narrative on the myth and magic of wild wolves and man's true place among the creatures of nature, now available as a Penguin Modern Classic.\nHordes of bloodthirsty wolves are slaughtering the arctic caribou, and the government's Wildlife Service assigns naturalist Farley Mowat to investigate. Mowat is dropped alone onto the frozen tundra, where he begins his mission to live among the howling wolf packs and study their ways. Contact with his quarry comes quickly, and Mowat discovers not a den of marauding killers but a courageous family of skillful providers and devoted protectors of their young. As Mowat comes closer to the wolf world, he comes to fear with them the onslaught of bounty hunters and government exterminators out to erase the noble wolf community from the Arctic.

Never Cry Wolf: Penguin Modern Classics Edition

MOWAT,FARLEY

Professionals & Academics

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