Last week we visited the exotic locale of Morocco, filled with fragrant foods, mosaic floors and soothing music. This week we’ve decided to stay a little closer to home and take a tour around our startlingly beautiful country, Canada.

Since many of you are already familiar with the cuisine and culture of Canada, we’ll run over some of our favourites. Any Canadian will tell you that you haven’t lived until you’ve had poutine in Quebec, Montreal-style bagels with smoked meat in Montreal, pancakes with maple syrup and Canadian back bacon in Ontario and freshly-made Nanaimo bars on the West Coast.

No matter which of these delectables you chose to serve at your book club gathering, you can be sure they will be a hit. To complete your offering, include some local wines from Ontario or British Columbia and some locally-brewed Ontario or Quebecois beer.

Decorate your place with red and white and include some maple leaves. If you’re hosting your book club meeting in the Fall, there are plenty of beautiful orange, red and brown leaves to gather and include in a table arrangement or two.

For your reading picks, we have many favourites. Our top book club choices include Katrina Onstad’s Everybody Has Everything, Grace O’Connell’s Magnified World and Lilian Natel’s Web of Angels.

Everybody Has Everything by Katrina Onstand combines a pitch-perfect, whip-smart dissection of contemporary urban life with a fresh and perceptive examination of our individual and collective ambivalence towards parenthood. It balances tragedy and comedy with verve and flair, and is destined to be one of Canada’s most talked-about novels.
Take a look at the touching book trailer.

Magnified World by Grace O’Connell is about what it means to be a daughter, a patient, a lover and a human being who can carry on after a massive loss. It dramatizes the battle between the head and the heart and the limitations of both in unlocking something as complicated as loss.

In Web of Angels, Lilian Natel introduces us to Sharon Lewis, a happy mother and wife. Life is definitely good for Sharon until the morning Heather Edwards, a pregnant teenaged friend of the family, kills herself. The reverberations of that act, and the ugly secrets that sparked it, prove deeply unsettling to the whole family, and stir up Sharon’s own troubling secret: she has DID, or dissociative identity disorder.
Read an excerpt.

Some other top recommendations include:
Touch by Alexi Zentner
Why Men Lie by Linden MacIntyre
Until the Night by Giles Blunt
Sussex Drive by Linda Svendsen
A Good Man by Guy Vanderhaeghe
The Little Shadows by Marina Endicott
Ru by Kim Thuy
Sleeping Funny by Miranda Hill

For a little light-hearted entertainment, see how much your guests know about Canada.

Here are 5 fun facts you probably never knew:

1. The origin of the name Canada comes from a St. Lawrence Iroquoian word, kanata, which means village or settlement.

2. Canada has the longest coastline in the world, about 243,000 kilometers in length.

3. The belief that the North Pole is owned by Canada is false. No country owns the North Pole.

4. Canada is the largest producer of a refreshingly sweet dessert wine called Icewine.

5. Montreal, which is sometimes referred to as The City of Churches, has more churches than houses.

Source: Canada Fun Facts

Next up you ask? Why South Africa, of course!