Farley Mowat Books in Order

Picking up where Otherwise left off, this memoir follows Mowat through his first years as a published writer, his troubled first marriage, and his discovery of Newfoundland and the sea, as he begins turning private outrage into public environmental battles.

Otherwise is a coming of age memoir covering 1937 to 1948, from an unconventional prairie youth through brutal combat in Italy to his first Arctic expeditions. It traces how war trauma and encounters with the North pushed him toward writing and activism.

In Bay of Spirits, Mowat recalls sailing Newfoundland’s remote outports in the 1950s, falling in love with both the coast and artist Claire Wheeler. The book blends a rough-edged love story with an elegy for a traditional fishing culture being dismantled.

This Arctic memoir revisits a 1947 collecting trip that became a harrowing journey among Métis trappers and starving Inuit families in the Barrens. Mowat’s account dwells on friendship, caribou migrations, and the human cost of government neglect in the North.

High Latitudes chronicles a 1960s inspection voyage around the eastern Arctic, as Mowat visits isolated settlements on the eve of massive change. He records bureaucratic blunders, stark landscapes and resilient northern communities while asking what kind of future is being forced upon them.

Walking on the Land returns to the story of the Ihalmiut people decades after Mowat first lived with them. Through oral histories, archival digging and a reunion with survivors, he traces how forced relocations and indifference nearly erased an entire inland Inuit culture.

In The Farfarers, Mowat proposes that a seafaring people he calls the Albans reached Iceland, Greenland and Newfoundland long before the Vikings. Mixing archaeology, saga lore and speculation, he imagines their walrus-hunting voyages and gradual disappearance into the North Atlantic world.

Aftermath follows Mowat and his first wife as they drive through postwar France and Italy in 1953, revisiting battlefields he once knew only under fire. The journey becomes a search for healing in landscapes still scarred by occupation, bombing and loss.

Drawn from wartime letters between Farley and his father Angus, My Father’s Son is an intimate portrait of a young officer and the librarian-novelist cheering him on from home. Their correspondence tracks fear, dark humor, ambition and the making of a writer.

Born Naked is a lively memoir of Mowat’s wandering childhood in the 1920s and 30s, from shaky boats and beekeeping schemes to prairie winters and menageries of wild pets. It shows how early mishaps with “the Others” shaped his lifelong loyalty to animals.

In Rescue the Earth, Mowat sits down with campaigners, scientists and whistleblowers who fight for whales, forests, rivers and endangered species. Through candid conversations he explores what turned them into green crusaders and how ordinary people can resist environmental destruction.

The New Founde Land combines history and memoir to tell the story of Newfoundland from early European landfalls to the collapse of the inshore fishery. Mowat weaves sagas, archival episodes and his own outport years into a sharp critique of modern development.

Virunga is Mowat’s biography of Dian Fossey and the mountain gorillas she studied in the forests of Central Africa. He traces her stubborn field work, clashes with poachers and officials, and the circumstances around her murder, set against the fragile world she tried to protect.

My Discovery of America is a brief, barbed account of Mowat’s attempt to tour the United States to promote Sea of Slaughter, only to be refused entry as a supposed security risk. He turns the episode into a darkly funny meditation on borders and fear.

Sea of Slaughter reconstructs how centuries of hunting, fishing and harvesting emptied the northwest Atlantic of whales, seabirds, seals and fish. Drawing on logs, records and fieldwork, Mowat details species after species pushed toward extinction by greed and official blindness.

And No Birds Sang is Mowat’s unsparing memoir of service with the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment in Sicily and Italy. What begins as a young man’s search for glory becomes a record of exhaustion, terror and grief as friends are killed one by one.

Combining Mowat’s text with John de Visser’s photographs, This Rock within the Sea portrays a small Newfoundland outport on the brink of government-forced resettlement. It captures kitchens, wharves and faces just before a distinctive coastal culture is scattered.

The Snow Walker gathers stories set in the Arctic, many drawn from Inuit oral tradition and Mowat’s own northern travels. Tales of hunters, shamans and wanderers reveal a world where survival, superstition and kinship are tightly bound to an unforgiving landscape.

The Serpent’s Coil follows the salvage tug Foundation Josephine through ferocious North Atlantic storms as her crew battles to save disabled freighters. Mowat turns log entries and interviews into a tense sea narrative about courage, luck and the thin margin between rescue and disaster.

The Regiment is a narrative history of the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment in the Second World War, written by one of its own officers. It traces the citizen soldiers from mobilization through Sicily, Italy and northwest Europe, focusing on daily life as much as strategy.

Wake of the Great Sealers pairs Mowat’s narrative with David Blackwood’s haunting prints to tell the story of Newfoundland sealing schooners and their crews. The book recalls daring voyages, shipwrecks and changing markets while asking what was lost when the old ice fleets disappeared.

Tundra is an anthology of classic overland journeys in the Canadian Arctic, edited and introduced by Mowat. Excerpts from explorers such as Samuel Hearne, John Franklin and others show sledging across the Barrens, winter starvation and the constant dependence on Indigenous guides.

A Whale for the Killing recounts how a fin whale became trapped in a shallow Newfoundland lagoon and was slowly brutalized by local hunters. Mowat’s efforts to save the animal lead to a searing indictment of whaling and casual cruelty toward other species.

In Sibir, Mowat and his wife travel thousands of miles across Siberia at the height of the Cold War, visiting mining towns, villages and wilderness. He finds a northern world both familiar and strange, and dwells on how people carve lives from an immense, harsh landscape.

The Boat Who Wouldn’t Float is a comic memoir of Mowat’s doomed love affair with an elderly wooden schooner named Happy Adventure. Chronic engine failures, leaks and eccentric shipmates turn a simple cruise around Newfoundland into one mishap after another on unforgiving waters.

The Polar Passion collects first-hand accounts of expeditions that tried to reach the North Pole, from sled journeys to drifting ice camps. Mowat frames these voices to show both the obsession that drove explorers north and the human costs of chasing a point on the map.

Canada North Now examines the modern Canadian North at a moment of rapid change, charting pipelines, mines, military bases and new towns alongside older Indigenous communities. Mowat argues that short-sighted development and southern politics are betraying both the land and the people who live there.

A sequel to Lost in the Barrens, The Curse of the Viking Grave sends Jamie, Awasin and their Inuit friend Peetyuk back into the North on a rescue mission that turns into a hunt for a buried Norse ship, complete with storms, wolves and ancient legends.

Never Cry Wolf describes Mowat’s assignment to study Arctic wolves and determine whether they were destroying caribou herds. Living alone on the tundra, he comes to see wolves as complex social animals that rely heavily on small prey, challenging deep-rooted myths about them.

The Black Joke is an adventure story about a Newfoundland schooner and her crew in the 1930s, when rum-running flourished. When an unwelcome passenger and a risky cargo draw them into trouble, skipper Jonathan Spence and his sons must outwit rival smugglers and authorities.

Owls in the Family follows a Saskatchewan boy whose household is upended when he adopts two great horned owls, Wol and Weeps. Between schoolroom chaos, backyard hijinks and small-town mishaps, the book celebrates inventive kids, odd pets and the prairie landscape.

Ordeal by Ice gathers journals and reports from the long search for a Northwest Passage through the Canadian Arctic islands. Mowat’s selections highlight frozen ships, desperate sled journeys and encounters with Inuit communities as explorers push repeatedly into the same lethal maze of ice.

The Grey Seas Under tells the story of the salvage tug Foundation Franklin and her crews as they spend two decades towing stricken ships out of Atlantic storms. It is a portrait of hazardous work in freezing seas, driven by stubborn seamanship rather than heroics.

Coppermine Journey is Mowat’s abridged, annotated edition of Samuel Hearne’s 18th century journals, recounting the first overland trek from Hudson Bay to the Arctic Ocean. Hearne’s narrative describes famine, long marches and complex relations with Dene and Inuit companions in the far North.

The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be is Mowat’s affectionate memoir of his boyhood in the Canadian prairies and his eccentric dog, Mutt. From ladder-climbing and goggle-wearing car rides to improbable hunting feats, the stories capture a free-ranging childhood close to the natural world.

The Desperate People continues the story begun in People of the Deer, tracing how disease, famine and forced relocations devastated the Ihalmiut between the 1940s and 1950s. Mowat blends personal witness with research to document a little-known human disaster in the Arctic interior.

Lost in the Barrens is a northern survival novel about Jamie, an orphan from the south, and his Cree friend Awasin, who are stranded above the treeline after a hunting trip goes wrong. Together they build shelter, hunt caribou and learn to read the land.

People of the Deer recounts Mowat’s early years living among the Ihalmiut in the Barren Lands of northern Canada. What begins as a naturalist’s field trip becomes an angry chronicle of hunger, caribou declines and official indifference toward an inland Inuit people on the brink.