Great reading that provides a sense of the city, from the Traveler online Ultimate Travel Library.
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Toronto Life magazine arts columnist and frequent book reviewer for Quill & Quire literary magazine, Alec Scott shares his picks for the city’s best top five books:
The Rebel Angels, by Robertson Davies (1981)
“[Robertson] Davies put Toronto on the international literary map, churning out readable, psychologically intricate tales of the city from the 1950s to his death in 1995. The Rebel Angels, is his best Toronto novel, dramatizing the white bread city’s own engagement with more colorful immigrants in the latter half of the 20th century.”
Headhunter, by Timothy Findlay (1993)
“Conveys the corruption and glamour of the city’s wealthiest (and most beautiful) inner district, Rosedale. Based loosely on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the novel is set in Toronto’s future, where Asian bird-flu–like plagues and a serial killer stalks the city.”
The Robber Bride, by Margaret Atwood (1993)
“Set in the neighborhood [Margaret] Atwood still lives in, the Annex, an enclave of self-righteous intellectuals. The novel features a predatory woman (said to be inspired by Barbara Amiel, the beleaguered press lord Conrad Black’s wife) who steals husbands (hence the title), and also pricks the smugness of the Annex inhabitants whose lives she ruins.”
In the Skin of a Lion, by Michael Ondaatje (1987)
“Probably the single best Toronto novel. As the Brooklyn Bridge is to New York, the King Edward viaduct, spanning the Don River, is to Toronto: the book dramatizes its construction. R.C. Harris, the city planner responsible for the shape and look of Toronto, is an outsize character in the book.”
Consolation, by Michael Redhill (2006)
“Nominated for this year’s [2007] Booker prize, it gives a sense of the urbanites’ longstanding love affair with the Toronto Islands. The book draws a contrast between the city’s teeming, eventful present and its relatively dour and somber Victorian past.”
