How to Start a Charter Airline: The novels of Susan Haley, formerly of Tulita, NWT

It’s refreshing to read a novel set in the North that doesn’t use emphasize the “remoteness” or “harsh winters,” but rather the warmth to be found there.

Umingmak: A fine new memoir of N.W.T. Commissioner Stuart Hodgson

I enjoyed this detailed, first-person account of peak colonialism in the N.W.T.

Northerners: 24 short, but vivid, biographies from 1989

These 24 capsule biographies from 30 years ago still do the trick.

A Plain Language Guide to the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement

Well-written and beautifully packaged.

The Berger Inquiry, 1970s journalism, and a book that captures it all

This reporter's account rips through the insanity of the Berger inquiry to get to the point: the gripping testimony by northerners, much of which is captured verbatim here. Hard to find, but great reading.

From Lishamie, Albert Canadien’s memoir of a village that no longer exists

I didn’t know that Treaty Day in Fort Providence, N.W.T., was also TB testing day, and I wouldn’t have known it if not for this highly detailed memoir.

Joe Sacco’s Paying the Land, a raw, dreamy, investigative look at the N.W.T., past and present

Where — I’ve asked myself repeatedly — is the book that sums up the N.W.T., tackles the confusion and history of it and does it in an engaging, complex, real way? It’s here.

The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History

“How prepared are we now?” Barry asks, writing sometime in 2004, after finishing his definitive account of the 1918 flu pandemic. His biggest worry had to do with “governments and the truth.”

An Arctic Man, the classic memoir by Hudson Bay Boy Ernie Lyall

This book is an actual classic, or at least the cover of the 2011 re-issue I have says it is, and that cover is right.

Life Among the Qallunaat, a vital memoir by Mini Aodla Freeman

If you want a detailed, human, funny and tragic picture of changing Inuit life in Canada in the 1950s and ‘60s, look no further.