The life and times of Antoine Mountain, Dene residential school survivor

Obviously a great way to get to know a place is to read about the lives of people who live there. Strange how difficult this still is.

From the Tundra to the Trenches by Eddy Weetaltuk

This seriously good book had me in its grasp from start to finish, until I learned some troublesome facts that made me question part of its power.

The Man who Lived with a Giant, stories from Johnny Neyelle

These stories, told in cinematic detail (almost all of them would make amazing graphic novels) feature battles, war, shape-shifters, heroes and heroines and voyages to the spirit world.

Jordin Tootoo’s All the Way: A hockey redemption story

“What? Really? I made it? I’m in the NHL? Holy fuck,” writes Jordin Tootoo in this 2014 autobiography. “The next thing you know, I was a household name in Nashville.”

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.

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

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

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.”