The best books to experience the Canadian city of Winnipeg if you can’t actually go there

This book pulls together three things that I love in fiction: big ideas, compelling characters, and a plot that keeps you guessing.

The big ideas really are “big” ones: What’s the nature of consciousness? How do memories create or distort our sense of identity? And how does our physical biology as “creatures” determine our inner psychology?

As for the city of Winnipeg itself, the novel leverages it in all kinds of ways. One example: A riot after a Winnipeg Jets hockey game leads to such national violence that the US President calls for an invasion of Canada to “help” restore order.

And, in one of the novel’s prescient plot points, this US invasion prompts Vladimir Putin to plan his own attack (keep in mind that this book was published six years before Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine!). 

What I adore about this book—which Carol Shields wrote a few years after winning the Pulitzer Prize for The Stone Diaries—is how it mingles the quotidian and the fanciful and the fantastic.

The quotidian takes the form of the very ordinary details in the life of the titular protagonist’s middle-aged life: The small things that Larry frets about, his ordinary conversations in Winnipeg coffee shops, his very relatable miscommunications, and even his fairly typical penis (there’s an entire chapter called “Larry’s Penis”).

Then there are the fanciful touches—for example, Larry makes garden labyrinths for a living (not a run-of-the-mill profession), and streets that don’t intersect in the real Winnipeg do intersect in the novel.

As for the fantastic, the novel ends with Larry having a vision of how his life might have gone in a happier alternative reality. 

I love books that make me feel like I’m living in another time period—and this book, set in Winnipeg in 1913—does that in spades. In fact, speaking of “spades,” Sam Spade, the protagonist of Dashiell Hammet’s The Maltese Falcon, is surely one of the inspirations for this mystery novel’s protagonist, Sam Klein, a hard-nosed detective.

The novel’s author, Allan Levine, is a historian, and the vivid details he pulls into the plot target all of our senses (including smell—Winnipeg’s streets weren’t paved in 1913, and horses were still more common than cars!). Levine also draws upon the prejudices of the era—Sam Klein isn’t accepted by the city’s elite because he’s Jewish—and he paints a compelling portrait of the city’s gritty neighborhoods and corrupt city politics. 

I love history—not just historical fiction but actual history books—and this book skillfully weaves together an abundance of intriguing facts and true stories from that city’s history.

Why 1912? Because in that year, Winnipeg was one of the most important cities in North America, largely because it was (and is) located in the very center of the continent, which led to it developing the biggest rail yard in the world.

As we learn from this book, luminaries such as Charlie Chaplin, W.C. Fields, Charles Dickens, Harry Houdini, and many more passed through this thriving city. But that changed in 1914 when the Panama Canal opened, and suddenly, goods were shipped from one ocean to another through that waterway instead of through Winnipeg. In terms of commerce, Winnipeg never fully recovered. 

This is a book of poetry written by one of Winnipeg’s many Indigenous authors.

I love the poems—their economical lines and vivid imagery—but the poems also don’t shy away from some ugly truths about Winnipeg: Namely, the centuries of racism that have devastated the Indigenous people who gathered for thousands of years where the city’s two rivers meet—the Red and the Assiniboine. The same racism that contributed to the death of the poet’s brother and led the police to dismiss his disappearance for months as simply being due to drunkenness.

Vermette’s poems tackle these hard truths and challenge the reader not to look away. This book of poetry helped me see that not everything about Winnipeg is the way we’d like it to be.