Mapped
Anne of Green Gables
L. M. Montgomery
Avonlea is invented, but Montgomery built it from Cavendish on Prince Edward Island, where the farmhouse she had in mind is now the preserved Green Gables Heritage Place, the most visited place on the island. The bbox runs from the north-shore Cavendish landscape south to Charlottetown, the real capital where Anne sits her Queen's exams. The first book here set in Canada.
6 places →
In the Skin of a Lion
Michael Ondaatje
Ondaatje's luminous novel gives back the immigrant workers written out of the making of Toronto in the 1910s and 1920s, following Patrick Lewis among the men who built the city's bridges and waterworks. The real Toronto is its stage: the great Bloor Street Viaduct rising over the Don Valley, the immigrant tanning district, the perilous tunnel dug out under Lake Ontario, and the cathedral-like waterworks that R.C. Harris built to purify the city's water.
5 places →
Obasan
Joy Kogawa
A schoolteacher, Naomi Nakane, pieces together the wartime uprooting of her Japanese-Canadian family: torn from their Vancouver home in 1942, interned in the interior British Columbia ghost town of Slocan, then forced onto the Alberta beet farms, while her mother, trapped in Japan, is lost to the Nagasaki bomb. Kogawa maps the real geography of the internment: the seized coastal home, the mountain camp, the prairie exile, and the silence her aunt Obasan keeps over it all.
5 places →
The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz
Mordecai Richler
The sharp, driven poor boy Duddy Kravitz claws his way up in 1940s Montreal, convinced by his grandfather that a man without land is nobody, and schemes to buy a Laurentian lake by any means. Richler maps his own city: the Jewish immigrant streets around Saint-Urbain and the Main, the downtown clubs where the gangster Duddy idolises holds court, and the Laurentian resort of Ste-Agathe and the hidden lake to the north on which the whole book turns.
5 places →
The Stone Angel
Margaret Laurence
Ninety-year-old Hagar Shipley, proud, unbending and afraid, looks back over her hard life on the Manitoba prairie as she flees her son's house rather than be put in a home. Laurence's Manawaka, drawn from the real prairie town of Neepawa, anchors the memory: the Currie store and the blind marble angel in the cemetery, the Shipley farm of her rough marriage, and the west-coast city where her old age plays out its last defiant days.
5 places →