Canada Reads 2026 Long-Listed Books

Hot off the presses! The list for 2026 has just been announced; it will then be narrowed down to five books, each championed by a Canadian celebrity. (To quote one of my former Canadian Studies students: “How can they be celebrities if I’ve never heard of any of them?” But we have a small population and we sidle up along a gargantuan exporter of popular culture. We have two famous Ryans, and that will just have to do.)

Fifteen books, and I won’t note all the titles, but I’m pleased to see two things: the diverse range (in terms of both authors and topics) and the inclusion of a crime novel, Julie Chan Is Dead by Liann Zhang.

This is a book I got excited about before it was even published, courtesy of a NetGalley preview and a big marketing campaign.

The relationship between publicity budgets and sales in the Canadian context merits some serious analysis; every year a few books seem ubiquitous–like last year’s The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus, by Emma Knight, a book I found . . . fine. But I may have missed something, because that novel was everywhere: I’m still seeing people read it on the bus. It’s gorgeously designed and has a great (if misleading) title. And it’s a quasi-mystery novel, with some engaging but very young characters and the exploration of a family secret. But I couldn’t quite understand the major hoopla.

Back to Zhang. I really enjoyed Julie Chan Is Dead. It’s funny and clever, and it breaks the rules about including twins in crime novels. The author’s website indicates that the novel was “an instant international bestseller.” But in this case, I think the pre-publication hype was merited.

I hope it makes the short list; I hope it’s not quickly eliminated. Last year, Samantha Bailey’s domestic thriller Watch Out for Her was the first book to fall, and that was unfortunate.

But Canada Reads discussions can be hard to predict (and some of them are, for people who teach literature for a living, painful to listen to, like the fracas some years ago over veracity and Marina Nemat’s brilliant memoir The Prisoner of Tehran).

I do understand why the CBC thinks the public would rather listen to Olympic medallists than profs talk about books. There is the danger, however, that championing books will not be in their set of skills.

So here’s wishing excellent luck to Julie Chan Is Dead. If nothing else, it’s very good news that two years in a row there’s a crime novel by a Canadian woman writer included on the long list for Canada Reads.