Winnipeg 150: Fiction

Fiction titles that reference extreme weather, street names, Slurpees, and more great things about Winnipeg.

Updated March 26, 2024
W
Winnipeg Public Library
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1

Baldur's Song: A Saga
Arnason, David
Paper Book
Winnipeg's boom-town days at the turn of the nineteenth century come to life through the eyes of Baldur, a boy from Gimli, the Icelandic immigrant settlement on the southernmost shore of Lake Winnipeg. Both city and boy grow from innocence to savvy creatures of business as they mature, fall in...

2

The case of Lena S.
Bergen, David
Paper Book
The Case of Lena S. follows the life, loves, and coming-of-age of sixteen-year-old Mason Crowe during a year in which he will learn what it truly means to be in the world. At the centre of the novel is Lena, a troubled girl who has “chosen” Mason and will teach him something of...
Also available in DAISY and eBook formats.

3

The Full Catastrophe: A Novel
Cook, Méira
Paper Book
Winner, 2023 Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction Finalist, 2023 McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award A compassionate and funny novel about defining yourself, the communities that support us, and the journeys that secrets propel. Charlie Minkoff, a thirteen...

Also available in eBook format and as a Book Club Kit.

4

In search of April Raintree
Mosionier, Beatrice
Paper Book
Memories. Some memories are elusive, fleeting, like a butterfly that touches down and is free until it is caught. Others are haunting. You'd rather forget them, but they won't be forgotten. And some are always there. No matter where you are, they are there, too. In this moving story...

Also avialable in DAISY, eBook and eAudiobook formats and as a Book Club Kit.

5

This Hidden Thing
Dueck, Dora
Paper Book
The young woman standing at the back door of the prosperous Winnipeg house that cold day in 1927 knew she had to have work. An immigrant, she needed to help her family. But she had no idea, when she finally got inside the house to be a domestic, that her experiences there would mark her for the...

Beginning in Winnipeg in the1920s, This Hidden Thing tells the moving story of Maria Klassen, a newly landed Mennonite immigrant. Maria becomes a domestic for a prosperous Canadian family in order to support her family as they struggle to build a life for themselves on a farm near the town of Winkler.

6

Some great thing
Hill, Lawrence
Paper Book
Mahatma Grafton is a disillusioned university graduate burdened with a famous name, and suffering from the curse of his generation -- a total lack of interest in the state of the world. The son of a retired railway porter from Winnipeg, he returns home for a job as a reporter with The...

7

Un Grand Destin: Roman
Hill, Lawrence
Paper Book

Nous sommes au debut des annees 1980. Mahatma Grafton vient de decrocher un emploi dans un quotidien de Winnipeg. C’est son premier poste. Avant meme son arrivee, les journalistes s’amusent a deviner d’ou il peut bien venir… On parie sur ses origines. C’est le seul Noir dans la salle des nouvelles.

8

The Dead of Midnight
Hunter, Catherine
Paper Book
Members of the bookclub at the Mystery Au Lait Cafe in Winnipeg are getting nervous, as events from their favourite murder mysteries start to come true-right in their own quiet neighbourhood of Wolseley. But Sarah Petursson and her neighbours can't stop themselves from reading the popular...

9

The Bootlegger's Confession
Levine, Allan
Paper Book
It's 1922 and business is booming for Saul and Lou Sugarman-- ­thanks to prohibition. But business gets personal when the Sugarmans' brother-in-law ends up dead. Looking for answers, private detective Sam Klein is called in to investigate.<...

Also available in eBook format.

10

Put on the armour of light
Macdonald, Catherine
Paper Book
2016 Manitoba Book Awards' Michael Van Rooy Award for Genre Fiction -- Winner Secrets are lurking behind the proper exteriors of Winnipeg's turn-of-the-century houses. In June 1899, the Reverend Charles Lauchlan's industrious life...

11

Little fish
Plett, Casey
Paper Book
From the author of the Lambda Literary Award-winning story collection A Safe Girl to Love, Wendy Reimer is a thirty-year-old trans woman in Winnipeg who comes across evidence that her late grandfather - a devout Mennonite farmer - might have been transgender himself. At first she dismisses this...

Also available in eBook and eAudiobook formats and as a Book Club Kit.

12

Under the ribs of death
Marlyn, John
Paper Book
Set in the immigrant community of Winnipeg’s North End, Under the Ribs of Death follows the progress of young Sandor Hunyadi as he struggles to cast off his Hungarian background and become a “real Canadian.” Embittered by poverty and social humiliation, Sandor rejects...

13

La Mesure du Temps
Boisjoli, Jean
Paper Book
Bernard, un homme du monde dans la soixantaine, retourne Saint-Boniface pour renouer avec ses origines. Accompagn de Marjolaine - une jeune femme qui a t sa prot g e -, il arpente la ville sur les traces des lieux, des tres et des v nements qui ont marqu son enfance singuli re. Au...

14

Cherry
Mayor, Chandra
Paper Book
Set in the Winnipeg skinhead scene of the early 1990s, Cherry is an unsettling account of a woman's negotiation of violence, memory, and identity. Mayor deftly employs the technique of pastiche to craft her story: newspaper articles, notes, photographs, letters, and even appointment slips are used...

15

The girl in the wall
Preston, Alison
Paper Book
After leaving the Winnipeg Police force, former Inspector Frank Foote has gone into home renovations. Tearing down a wall on a Norwood Flats job one day, he and his partner come across the skeleton of a small female who has been imprisoned there. They alert the police, who confiscate their tools...

16

Rue Deschambault
Roy, Gabrielle
Paper Book
Semiautobiographical and universal in appeal, Street of Riches is about a young girl's growing up in a suburb of Winnipeg, Manitoba. Here is Christine, the perceptive narrator of The Road Past Altamont (also a Bison Book), awakening to natural and sometimes terrifying beauty, to family history, to...

17

Street of Riches: Penguin Modern Classics Edition
Roy, Gabrielle
Paper Book
Semiautobiographical and universal in appeal, Street of Riches is about a young girl's growing up in a suburb of Winnipeg, Manitoba. Here is Christine, the perceptive narrator of The Road Past Altamont (also a Bison Book), awakening to natural and sometimes terrifying beauty, to family history, to...

18

The prairie bridesmaid
Salamon, Daria.
Paper Book
Anna Lasko is a frustrated schoolteacher in her thirties. While her almost-but-not-quite ex-boyfriend Adam is on a work assignment in Europe, Anna finds herself tricked into a ditch-the-loser intervention by her supportive yet meddling girlfriends. More frustrated than ever, Anna starts to...

19

An Unexpected Break in the Weather
Schnitzer, Deborah
Paper Book
"A Rose on Corydon" is a bridal shop like no other. With a staircase spiraling around a pillar that is a floor-to-ceiling aquarium stocked with tropical fish, and an unrivalled eclectic selection, "A Rose on Corydon" has been the city's "go-to" bridal salon for three decades. At the center of the...

20

The republic of love
Shields, Carol
Paper Book
With a viewpoint that shifts as crisply as cards in the hands of a blackjack dealer, Carol Shields introduces us to two shell-shocked veterans of the wars of the heart. There's Fay, a folklorist whose passion for mermaids has kept her from focusing on any one man. And right across the street there's...

Also available in DAISY, eBook and Large Print formats.

21

Le Soleil du Lac Qui Se Couche
Leveille, J. R.
Paper Book

Angele, la narratrice, est une Metisse, un peu honteuse de ses origines, qui ne connait pas le mitchif car elle a fait ses etudes dans le quartier francophone de Winnipeg, mais elle porte en elle les traces de sa double genealogie : une certaine demarche, tout d'abord, mais aussi une propension au reve, senti comme non-distinct de la realite, une maniere particuliere de rire et un sens inne de l'elementarite.

22

The Setting Lake Sun
Léveillé, J. R.
Paper Book
The Setting Lake Sun, J.R. Léveillé's first novel set in his native Manitoba, describes the unforgettable encounter of Angèle, an aspiring young Métis architect, with Ueno Takami, an older Japanese poet. The story begins when they meet at an art gallery in Winnipeg, a city surprisingly...

Also available in eBook format.

23

Vanishing monuments : a novel
Stintzi, John Elizabeth
Paper Book
Alani Baum, a non-binary photographer and teacher, hasn't seen their mother since they ran away with their girlfriend when they were seventeen - almost thirty years ago. But when Alani gets a call from a doctor at the assisted living facility where their mother has been for the last five years, they...

24

Fox
Sweatman, Margaret
Paper Book
Fox moves on quick and elegant feet through the terror and exhilaration of Winnipeg's 1919 General Strike, the most turbulent period of the city's history. In a novel of remarkably vivd, kinetic power, the collision of the wealthy and working classes after the First World War becomes a backdrop...

25

Bandit
Tefs, Wayne
Paper Book
In 1966, Ken Leishman stepped onto the Winnipeg Airport tarmac and into the pages of Canadian history as the mastermind behind the country's largest gold theft. Known as the "flying bandit" or the "gentleman bandit," Leishman had already gained Dillinger-esque notoriety as a bank robber, when he...

26

Summer of My Amazing Luck
Toews, Miriam
Paper Book
Summer of My Amazing Luck is Miriam's first novel and a favourite for many die-hard Toews fans.      Welcome to Winnipeg's Have-a-Life housing project . . . better known as Half-a-Life. Meet eighteen year-old Lucy and flamboyant Lish, two of...

Also available in Audiobook, DAISY and eBook formats.

27

An Ordinary Decent Criminal
Van Rooy, Michael
Paper Book
All ex-drug addict and reformed thief Montgomery Haavik wants to do is settle down with his wife and baby in their new Winnipeg home and work on building a straight life; one free of the day-to-day hustle and danger of being a career criminal. But for a man who's never held down a legitimate job...

28

The break
Vermette, Katherena
Paper Book
Winner of the Amazon.ca First Novel Award and a finalist for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and the Governor General's Literary Award, The Break is a stunning and heartbreaking debut novel about a multigenerational Métis-Anishnaabe family dealing with the fallout of a shocking...

Also available in DAISY, eBook and eAudiobook formats and as a Book Club Kit.

29

Ligne Brisée
Vermette, Katherena
Paper Book

Lorsqu’une jeune Metisse est victime d’une violente agression, les contrecoups se font sentir dans toute la communaute du quartier North End de Winnipeg. Policiers charges de l’enquete, famille, amis et connaissances voient leurs certitudes ebranlees a mesure que se precise le fil des evenements.

Aussi disponible en format numerique.

30

Kiss of the fur queen
Highway, Tomson
Paper Book
Born into a magical Cree world in snowy northern Manitoba, Champion and Ooneemeetoo Okimasis are all too soon torn from their family and thrust into the hostile world of a Catholic residential school. Their language is forbidden, their names are changed to Jeremiah and Gabriel, and both boys are...

Also available in eBook format.

31

Dating: A Novel
Williamson, Dave
Paper Book
Jenkins never dreamed he'd live long enough to be dating again. Old folks acting like teenagers was unheard of in his parents' generation. Less than two years after his beloved wife's death, Jenkins finds himself sheepishly slinking past her portrait to take another woman out to the movies. With...

32

Crackpot
Wiseman, Adele
Paper Book
Hoda, the protagonist of Crackpot, is one of the most captivating characters in Canadian fiction. Graduating from a tumultuous childhood to a life of prostitution, she becomes a legend in her neighbourhood, a canny and ingenious woman, generous, intuitive, and exuding a wholesome lust for...

33

Champion et Ooneemeetoo : roman
Highway, Tomson
Paper Book

Champion et Ooneemeetoo, ce sont deux freres cris nes d’aurores boreales, eleves au rythme des rires et des sabots de caribou martelant le sol de la toundra. Un jour, ils sont envoyes tres loin dans le sud dans un pensionnat autochtone, ou une tout autre realite les attend. Heureusement, la Reine blanche veille sur eux. Impregnes a la fois de la magie et de l’humour de la culture crie, et du potentiel redempteur de l’art, les freres se fabriqueront, l’un par la musique et le theatre, l’autre par la danse, une liberte nouvelle.

Aussi disponible en format numerique.

34

Ma Vie Est Entre Tes Mains
Aubry, Suzanne
Paper Book

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