The Right to Be Cold: Sheila Watt-Cloutier’s urgent memoir

Earnest memoir recounts minute details of a fascinating life, bureaucratic tussles included.

I, Nuligak: A memoir of Inuvialuit life in the last heyday of the whalers

‘Because I was an orphan and a poor one at that, my mind was always alert to the happenings around me. Once my eyes had seen something, it was never forgotten.’

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.

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.”

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.”

Northern Wildflower: Catherine Lafferty’s nine lives

Catherine Lafferty’s journey from wild youth to politically-conscious council member for the Yellowknives Dene First Nation chronicles her constant search to find something better, in spite of the many obstacles in her life.