Books like The Incomparable Atuk by Mordecai Richler

After a Cessna crash leaves teenage Brian Robinson alone in the Canadian wilderness, he must learn to survive, uncovering self-reliance and resilience amid a harsh, beautiful landscape.

James McBride’s memoir chronicles his upbringing among twelve siblings in Brooklyn’s Red Hook, revealing his mother’s hidden Jewish heritage and their shared journey of race, identity, and faith.

Paul Auster’s 1999 novella Timbuktu follows the inner life of a dog named Mr. Bones as his homeless master nears death, revealing the quiet resilience of animals and the melancholy of late‑20th‑century New York.

Follow Aminata Diallo, a child sold into slavery in South Carolina, as she escapes to Canada after the Revolutionary War and seeks a new life of freedom.

The story of a young Jewish man from Montreal who learns lessons in life from a series of mentors, including his father and a man from his workplace.

Three interwoven tales set across 300 years of New York City, ranging from a 19th‑century ghost story to a contemporary thriller and a far‑future science‑fiction saga.

Legacy, love, and a startling photograph bring the troubled poet James Mangan back to life decades after his fame faded. A son grapples with past, present, and identity amid a family’s hidden history.

Barney Panofsky smokes too many cigars, drinks too much whiskey, and is obsessed with two things: the Montreal Canadiens hockey team and his ex-wife Miriam. An acquaintance from his youthful years in Paris, Terry McIver, is about to publish his autobiography. In its pages he accuses Barney of an assortment of sins, including murder. It's time, Barney decides, to present the world with his own version of events. Barney's Version is his memoir, a rambling, digressive rant, full of revisions and factual errors (corrected in footnotes written by his son) and enough insults for everyone, particularly vegetarians and Quebec separatists. But Barney does get around to telling his life story, a desperately funny but sad series of bungled relationships. His first wife, an artist and poet, commits suicide and becomes--a la Sylvia Plath--a feminist icon, and Barney is widely reviled for goading her toward death, if not actually murdering her. He marries the second Mrs. Panofsky, whom he calls a "Jewish-Canadian Princess," as an antidote to the first; it turns out to be a horrible mistake. The third, "Miriam, my heart's desire," is quite possibly his soul mate, but Barney botches this one, too. It's painful to watch him ruin everything, and even more painful to bear witness to his deteriorating memory. The mystery at the heart of Barney's story--did he or did he not kill his friend Boogie?

An imaginary life is a tale of Ovid's meeting with a feral boy in the Black Sea village during his exile.

A novel of the middle ages.

After his mother dies, 12‑year‑old David escapes into the stories that once comforted him, only for myth and war to collide in a world where a Crooked Man and a faded king rule over wolves and hidden secrets.