Ontario

Ontario authors write from a province that runs from Windsor to the Ottawa River and up past Sudbury, and the fiction reflects that range. You will find courtroom thrillers, small-town mysteries, historical novels for young readers, poetry rooted in the Canadian Shield, and immigrant family sagas set in Toronto and its suburbs.

This is where the province's voices gather, whether they set their books in a northern mill town or a downtown apartment.

Ontario authors work across a wider spread of settings than their counterparts in British Columbia, and the difference shows in the books. Barbara Fradkin writes procedural mysteries set in Ottawa, while Giles Blunt works the northern Ontario terrain of Algonquin Bay. Jean Rae Baxter and Barbara Haworth-Attard turn to the province's early history for younger readers. Others stay closer to home: Andrew Binks and Dawn Promislow write about intimacy and displacement, Bianca Lakoseljac and Deepa Rajagopalan about immigrant families finding their footing, and Kim Fahner and Laurie D Graham about the near north. Several write for children and teens, among them Kari-Lynn Winters, Laura Bontje and Kathleen McDonnell, and a few, like J.M. Frey and Mark Leslie, work in speculative and genre fiction. What holds these writers together is not a single style but a shared geography: small towns, lake country, city neighbourhoods and the long histories that sit underneath them.