A dozen of this country’s writers were asked to respond to the question “What are the great events in Canadian history?” by writing an original story that would incorporate a key historical episode that helped shape our nation. Each fictional account would also include a preface describing the writer’s reasons for choosing that particular defining moment in our history.

The stories gathered here become a conversation of country, of history as narrative, and an open book of imaginative values. How do you recreate a country? Story of a Nation is one way.

Thomas King’s “Where the Borg Are” brings together the Indian Act and the characters of Star Trek through the imagination of a young boy named Milton Friendlybear. King, who has learned the hard way not to trust history, offers up a masterpiece of historical fact and imaginative creation. In “The Death of Albert ‘Ginger’ Godwin,” Michael Turner employs the narrative device of a “Very Old Man Who Wishes to Remain Anonymous” to tell the tale of the man whose murder in 1918 in Cumberland, B.C., sparked Canada’s first general strike. Turner’s informant sees history as “a business, and like any good business you have to manage it properly.” As Margaret Atwood says in her introduction to a fictional account of a frightened woman who witnesses the fall of Quebec, “it’s intriguing to play What If with history.”

Whether it’s David Macfarlane on the enormous losses suffered by Newfoundlanders in the First World War to Antonine Maillet on the expulsion of the Acadians, no reader will emerge from Story of a Nation unchanged.