A Cross-Country Canon

It was inevitable that This Is My Country, What’s Yours? A Literary Atlas of Canada would evoke memories of Margaret Atwood’s Survival. Noah Richler’s observations about the contemporary fabric of literary Canada are an impressive update on how far we have come since Survival’s publication in 1972. Richler’s quest to find Canada through its literary mythology could be described as epic, a form he talks about a great deal in this book. This important work should be read by everyone who has an interest in our literary heritage and in this country’s history.

Other reviews have cited this book as political. In many respects they are right in as much as This Is My Country should certainly be put in the hands of the people who run faceless corporations so that they can gain some understanding of what happens when “the company town” goes global. Several of the writers who are interviewed in the book talk about that topic specifically...