Independent booksellers’ top-selling Canadian titles of 2022

Suzette Mayr and Michelle Good topped the list of Canadian authors sold through independent bookstores in 2022.

Good’s multi-award-winning 2020 novel Five Little Indians was the bestselling book for Canadian independents reporting sales through Bookmanager. Suzette Mayr’s Scotiabank Giller Prize-winning novel The Sleeping Car Porter was the top-selling title published by a Canadian-owned publisher, and was the third-highest-selling book by a Canadian author.

In March 2022, Quill & Quire published the first list of top-selling books published by Canadian-owned publishers, based on sales figures collected by Bookmanager between February 1, 2021, and January 31, 2022.

The 2022 bestseller list is drawn from Bookmanager’s sales data gathered from 246 independent Canadian booksellers between February 1, 2022 and December 31, 2022.

The 26 bestselling titles (#25 was a tie) published by Canadian-owned presses once again all fall within the top 75 Canadian-authored titles reported to Bookmanager.

Twelve of the books are 2022 publications and four were published in 2021. Nine of the books are nonfiction; seven are fiction; nine are children’s or YA titles (Robert Munsch’s Love You Forever made the list in both paperback and board book formats); and one a calendar.

Unsurprisingly, there is a consistency in titles between the 2021 and 2022 lists. Of the top sellers, 11 appeared on the previous year’s list. Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves remains firmly in the number-two spot; 21 Things You May Not Know About the Indian Act by Bob Joseph moved from first to third spot; Richard Wagamese’s three titles barely shifted in their ranking; and Mushrooms of British Columbia continues to hold interest.

Phyllis Webstad’s 2022 book With Our Orange Hearts replaces her previously published titles on the list; Iona Whishaw’s latest Lane Winslow mystery, Framed in Fire, replaces her 2021 instalment in the series (surprisingly A Killer in King’s Cove, the original Lane Winslow mystery from 2016, is not much further down the list); and The Polestar Family Calendar (2023) once again sits among the top sellers.

Spurred by numerous award nominations, Brian Thomas Isaac’s 2021 novel All the Quiet Places makes an appearance in the top 25 of 2022, and Catherine Hernandez’s 2017 novel Scarborough – which was the runner up in Canada Reads 2022 to Five Little Indians, and was made into a film in 2021 – ranks at number five.

Notably, coming in at number 11 is The Little Book: Story Reader for a Free Ukraine by Mykola Matwijczuk (a reissue of a 1932 Ukrainian reader with new English translations) which was published as a fundraiser in March 2022. To date, sales of The Little Book have contributed more than $20,000 to various charities providing humanitarian aid in Ukraine and helping with the resettlement of Ukrainian refugees in Canada.

The list of the top 20 Canadian-authored titles sold by indie booksellers follows after the list of the 25 top sellers published by independent Canadian publishers.

Twenty-five top sellers from Canadian-owned publishers