In Saqiyuq, 3 oral histories read like great fiction — full of suspense, drama and revelations

This is, quite simply, an amazing book.

Boundless: Kathleen Winter takes a cruise

Terrible garbage.

The Mundane and the Holy: Libby Whittall Catling’s life on the land

Libby Whittall Catling is no Karl Ove Knausgaard. She refuses to cross the bar of common decency and write about her life in explosive detail. But this is still an absorbing and reflective book about a very distant corner of the N.W.T.

Georgia: An Arctic Diary offers sketches of life in Igloolik in 1982, with a central mystery

I’m weirdly fascinated by this book. More by its existence than its actual contents.

Consumption: A medical redemption wrapped in the epic tale of TB in the North

Somehow this book didn’t make a strong impression the first time I read it. Re-reading it, I was struck by its scale and scope, and completely drawn into the hopes and fates of its many characters. And it doesn’t get any better than that.

Arctic Dreams: Barry Lopez’s monument to the Far North

This weighty naturalist's tome from 1986 speaks just as loudly today.

Moccasin Square Gardens, or: Man that Richard Van Camp writes a lot of stories

I loved nearly all of the short stories in Van Camp’s latest collection, but when I got to “Ehtsée/Grandpa," I was actually kind of blown away.

True North Rising: 50 years of memories from Whit Fraser

“An expression of abiding love for northern Canada and its people, True North Rising is an irresistible collection of stories, rants, and intimate confessions,” writes Jim Bell of Nunatsiaq News, whose review of this book is dead on.

Tanya Tagaq’s Split Tooth: Fiction, memoir and homespun myth

There’s no better description of scent in the Arctic than in Tanya Tagaq’s Split Tooth: “The air is so clean you can smell the difference between smooth rock and jagged. You can smell water running over shale.”

A short digression on the great Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe

Obviously the Ibo people in Nigeria are pretty different from anyone living in the (now) Canadian Arctic, but Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart is a beautiful story of one worldview giving way to another, with pretty drastic consequences.