The best Canadian books of 2023
CBC Books has rounded up all our best books of 2023 lists in one handy place! Check out the top Canadian fiction, nonfiction, poetry, comics and kids books of the year.
Fiction
Our top pick: Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton
Birnam Wood is an engaging eco-thriller set in the middle of a landslide in New Zealand. Mira, the founder of a guerilla gardening collective that plants crops amid other criminal environmental activities, sets her sights on an evacuated farm as a way out of financial ruin. The only problem is the American billionaire Robert Lemoine has already laid claim to it as his end-of-the-world lair. After the same thing for polar opposite reasons, their paths cross and Robert makes Mira an offer that would stave off her financial concerns for good. The question is: can she trust him?
Birnam Wood was shortlisted for the 2023 Scotiabank Giller Prize.
Eleanor Catton is a London, Ont.-born New Zealand author. She won the 2013 Booker Prize for fiction and the 2013 Governor General's Literary Award for fiction for her second novel, The Luminaries.
Nonfiction
Our top pick: 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.
Comics
Our top pick: Bad Medicine by Christopher Twin
Inspired by Cree folklore and modern Cree life, Bad Medicine follows five teens who share chilling horror stories around a campfire.
Christopher Twin is from the Swan River First Nations reservation in northern Alberta. Currently based in Edmonton, he does comic work and illustrations as a freelancer.
Poetry
Our top pick: Wires that Sputter by Britta Badour
Britta Badour's debut collection of poetry, Wires that Sputter, explores topics like pop culture, sports, family dynamics and Black liberation.
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Britta Badour's powerful poetry is inspired by her family, community and her experience of Blackness
Badour, better known as Britta B., is an artist, public speaker and poet living in Toronto. She is the recipient of the 2021 Breakthrough Artist Award from the Toronto Arts Foundation. She teaches spoken word performance at Seneca College.
Kids
Our top pick: When You Can Swim by Jack Wong
When You Can Swim is a picture book that encourages children to overcome their fears of the water. In the book, an adult explains to a young girl the joys and surprises of swimming.
When You Can Swim is for ages 4 to 8.
Jack Wong is a Halifax-based author and illustrator who was born in Hong Kong but grew up in Vancouver. When You Can Swim is his first book.
Middle grade
Our top pick: The Probability of Everything by Sarah Everett
The Probability of Everything follows 11-year-old Kemi Carter, an avid fan of probability. When she sees an asteroid hovering over the sky, her perspective on everything changes. The asteroid has an 84.7 per cent chance of colliding with Earth in four days. Is she the only one who feels like the world is ending?
Sarah Everett is an author of several books for teens, currently based in Alberta. Her debut novel is Some Other Now.
Young adult
Our top pick: Woke Up Like This by Amy Lea
In Woke Up Like This, ultra-organised Charlotte Wu is 17 years old and trying to plan the perfect prom. While hanging up decorations in the gym with her archnemesis J. T. Renner, Charlotte falls off a ladder and crash lands directly on Renner. The next thing Charlotte knows she is waking up in a strange room, she is 30 and her and Renner are engaged to be married. Charlotte and Renner are determined to figure out what happened and how to get themselves back to their 17-year-old selves. Woke Up Like This is on the Canada Reads 2024 longlist.
Woke Up Like This is for ags 14 and up.
Amy Lea is an Ottawa-based contemporary romance writer and Canadian bureaucrat. Her previous novels include Exes and O's and Set on You. Woke Up Like This is on the longlist for Canada Reads 2024.
