You can’t take a left turn without running into a historical fiction novel set in England or the United States. However, if you’re in the market for historical fiction set in Canada, the hunt is more of a challenge. As Paper Lantern Writers’ resident Canadian, I wanted to help with that search. Here are 15 historical fiction novels set (at least in part) in Canada.
1. Marilla of Green Gables
Let’s start with something set on Prince Edward Island, my province. Marilla of Green Gables by Sarah McCoy is a prequel to Anne of Green Gables where we get to know a younger version of Marilla Cuthbert. The book is beautifully written and gets this Anne fan’s stamp of approval. I got to meet Sarah when she did a book signing in Charlottetown when the book launched.
Learn more at Goodreads and at Sarah’s website.
2. Bound
Also set on Prince Edward Island, Theresa Redmond’s Bound reaches back to the late 1700s when it was known as St. John’s Island. Through the lives of various characters, Bound navigates the challenges and triumphs of settler life. Learn more at Goodreads or at Theresa’s website.
3. Come from Away
Now we swing on over to Nova Scotia where I was born and grew up. Genevieve Graham has several Canadian-set historical fiction novels. Come From Away is a WWII-era novel that takes place in a small town on Nova Scotia’s southern side where “wolf packs” of German U-boats are lurking in the water. Learn more on Goodreads and at Genevieve’s website.
4. The Seamstress of Acadie
Staying in Nova Scotia, we travel back to the 1750s with Laura Frantz in The Seamstress of Acadie. This historical romance takes place during the long battle for power and territory between the English and the French, focusing on an Acadian family that wishes to remain neutral. Unfortunately, if you know anything about Acadian/Nova Scotia history, you already 10,000 Acadians were violently forced out of Nova Scotia. Learn more about the novel at Goodreads or at Laura’s website.
5. The Book of Negroes
Also based partially in Nova Scotia, The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill has won just about every Canadian literature prize available, and for good reason. This sweeping novel tells the story of Aminata Diallo who is abducted from her African village, sold into slavery in South Carolina, serves the British during the Revolutionary War and fights for her freedom. The title comes from a historic record that lists all the enslaved people who escaped to serve as British Loyalists before they were transported to Nova Scotia. Learn more at Goodreads or at Lawrence’s website.
6. The Birth House
Also a favorite among Canadian book critics, The Birth House by Ami McKay is set in in an isolated Nova Scotia community in the early 1900s. A group of midwives help the community’s women with childbirth, unwanted pregnancies, sexual health and more until a doctor promising painless childbirth shows up and undermines their credibility. Learn more at Goodreads or at Ami’s website.
7. River Thieves
We now head over to Newfoundland and Labrador where River Thieves by Michael Crummey takes place. As European settlers took over traditional fishing and hunting territories of the Indigenous Beothuk population, the Beothuk moved further inland, leading to the deaths of many Beothuk. A critically adored crime novel that interweaves the tragic history of the Beothuk. Learn more at Goodreads or at the Penguin Random House Canada website.
8. The Home for Unwanted Girls
Now we move west from Atlantic Canada to Quebec. The Home for Unwanted Girls by Joanna Goodman, set in 1940s-1950s Quebec, kinda shredded my heart a little bit. Before this book, I wasn’t familiar with the greedy and cruel practices that turned Quebec orphanages into psychiatric institutions basically overnight in order to get more government funding. This novels tells the story of a mother and daughter caught in an impossible situation. Learn more at Goodreads or at Joanna’s website.
9. Daughters of the Deer
Danielle Daniel’s novel Daughters of the Deer tells the story of a mother and daughter, Marie and Jeanne, living in 17th century Algonquin Territory. In order to better protect her people, Marie is encouraged to take a French settler in the Trois-Rivières, Quebec area. When it becomes clear her teenage daughter Jeanne is two-spirited (i.e. queer), she knows the French Catholic settlers won’t accept her, even though it is a respected trait among Indigenous people. Learn more at Goodreads or at Danielle’s website.
10. Bride of New France
In a residential area of Charlesbourg, Quebec, there are two cross streets called Rue Marie-De Lamarre and Rue Guillaume-Renaud. Marie-De Lamarre was one of the 800 women sent from France in the late 1600s to its French colony in Canada with the purpose of marrying and populating Quebec. She married Guillaume Renaud. The two of them are my great (times ten) grandparents. In fact, a lot of Canadians are descendants of the filles du roi, literally meaning “daughters of the king.”
Bride of New France by Suzanne Desrochers tells the story of two best friends who are shipped from Paris to Montreal as filles du roi which was probably terrifying. The world would have looked very, very different on this side of the Atlantic. You can learn more about this book at Goodreads or at Penguin Random House website.
11. The Quintland Sisters
Five baby girls were born in Ontario in the 1930s. The Quintland Sisters by Shelley Wood is the fictionalized version of their tragic lives as told by one of their caretakers. The Dionne quints were immediately super famous and considered too precious a commodity to stay with their French farming parents. The first set of quintuplets to survive to adulthood, the Dionne sisters were treated as a tourist attraction, receiving 6000 visitors per day. You can learn more about this novel at Goodreads or at Shelley’s website.
12. Looking for Jane
This novel was fantastic. Jumping through multiple eras of time but staying in the Toronto, Ontario area, Looking for Jane by Heather Marshall is a riveting, raw, and heartbreaking look at Canada’s abortion laws, the women they affected, and the heroes who provided illegal and underground abortions to women in need. You can learn more on Goodreads or Heather’s website.
13. Crow Mary
We move further west to Saskatchewan in the 19th century where, in Crow Mary by Kathleen Grissom, a young Crow Native woman is caught between two worlds. Indigenous woman Goes First, also called Mary, and her white fur trader husband trek to Cypress Hills to start a trading post—but the Cypress Hills Massacre of 1873 changes her life forever. Learn more at Goodreads or at Kathleen’s website.
14. Five Little Indians
Another critical darling, Five Little Indians by Michelle Good is set in British Columbia, beginning in the 1960s. After years of abuse inflicted by the residential school system, five friends make their way to Vancouver. Their lives criss-cross over the next few decades as they try to forget and conquer their trauma-caused demons in different ways. Learn more at Goodreads or at Michelle’s website.
15. The End of East
The End of East by Jen Sookfong Lee is also set in Vancouver, this time in the city’s Chinatown district. This multi-generational story weaves a present-day and past narrative, going deeper as Sammy learns more of her family’s arrival in Canada. Learn more at Goodreads or at the Penguin Random House Canada website.
Do you have any favorite Canada-set historical fiction novels that didn’t make the list? Let us know in the comments below!
Jillianne writes delightful historical fiction and historical romance featuring rebellious heroines and happy endings. Her debut novel was shortlisted for the 2016 PEI Book Award and her Victorian historical fiction novel, The Spirited Mrs. Pringle, was longlisted for the 2022 Historical Fiction Company Book Award. She is also the author of the WWII romance trilogy, Homefront Hearts. Jill lives on Canada’s beautiful east coast.
Great blog. Lots of interesting options.
Great list and a real eye-opener for this Californian!
Excellent list of books! Fantabulous <3
Jillianne, this is a great list! Might I mention my own trilogy: Unconventional Daughters, Uncommon Sons, and Undeniable Relations, also set in Nova Scotia in the 20th century. It’s an interlinked family saga, independently published.
For more info, one can find me at https://brucebishopauthor.com
Thank you! great list. I notice that most of these seem to be published by Canadian publishers. Does anyone know of a big historical novel set in Canada that was published by an American publishing house (not a branch office like HarperCanada but the home office in the USA)? If you have a book set in Canada, is it feasible to pitch to an American agent and/or book publisher or will they not be interested?
Hi Gary,
I can’t say for sure as I have personally never written a book set in Canada. From what I’ve read, Canadian authors are more likely to have luck with finding a Canadian agent for their Canadian-set book and those agents might have more relationships with Canadian publishers. However, it depends on the book—if the agent thinks it has a wider appeal than the Canadian market, they will do their best to get it a wider distribution. Good luck!
Thank you so much for this thoughtful and well written and blog post. I have a whole bunch of new books to put on my reading list.
In the meantime, I’m hoping you can solve a mystery for me. Several years back, I read a book that was set in a remote coastal area of Canada, involved two men who owned an in and were a little bit at a crossroads as to what to do with, the end as well as their relationship. Enter… I could be completely wrong here… But what I recall is that there is a plane crash and in addition to bodies washing up, there are survivors, all of home and up sheltering at the end.
I have a vagrant collection of something about birds being in the title or falling as in birds falling up or something like that. I’m stumped and I really want to read this beautiful book again, but can’t remember the title can you help? Thank you so much! My email is annie@anastasiaburke.com.
I suggest adding Willa Cather’s novel to your list: “Shadows on the Rock”.
The Vintage Classics edition is shown on Amazon with this text: “Willa Cather’s novel of seventeenth-century Quebec is a luminous evocation of North American origins, and of the men and women who struggled to adapt to a new world even as they clung to the artifacts and manners of one they left behind.
In 1697, Quebec is an island of French civilization perched on a bare gray rock amid a wilderness of trackless forests. For many of its settlers, Quebec is a place of exile, so remote that an entire winter passes without a word from home. But to twelve-year-old Cécile Auclair, the rock is home, where even the formidable Governor Frontenac entertains children in his palace and beavers lie beside the lambs in a Christmas créche. As Cather follows this devout and resourceful child over the course of a year, she re-creates the continent as it must have appeared to its first European inhabitants. And she gives us a spellbinding work of historical fiction in which great events occur first as rumors and then as legends—and in which even the most intimate domestic scenes are suffused with a sense of wonder.”