Iain Reid Books in Order

Iain Reid was born in Ottawa in 1981 and grew up on a family farm outside the city. That mix of rural quiet and close family life shows up all through his work. Even when his fiction turns strange, it usually starts in a familiar place, a house, a road, a meal, a private conversation.

Books were part of the atmosphere early on. His father taught English, and Reid has said that talking about reading around the dinner table was normal. At Queen's University he studied history, while also spending serious time with philosophy and literature. A writing course there helped him see that writing might be more than a side interest.

He planned to take a year before grad school. That year never really ended.

After university he moved to Toronto and worked a string of jobs, including call centre work, restaurant serving, basketball coaching, and home renovation. At the same time he wrote fiction in his spare hours, sent it out, and collected rejections. Instead of quitting, he shifted toward essays, columns, and radio work, writing for newspapers and magazines and for CBC Radio. That apprenticeship helped shape the plain, tight style readers still notice in his books.

His first two books were memoirs, and they show a lighter side of that voice. One Bird's Choice follows his return to his parents' hobby farm as an overeducated, underemployed twentysomething who expects a short stay and winds up lingering. The Truth About Luck pairs him with his ninety-two-year-old grandmother for a five-day staycation in Kingston. People who love these books usually mention the dry humour, the family warmth, and the way Reid can be funny without losing sight of bigger questions about time, luck, and growing older. One Bird's Choice won the CBC Bookie Award for Best Nonfiction Book, and Reid later received the RBC Taylor Emerging Writer Award in 2015.

Then he took a hard left.

That turn produced I'm Thinking of Ending Things, the novel that brought him to a much wider audience. The setup is simple, a young woman drives with her boyfriend to meet his parents at a remote farm. Reid turns that small premise into a tight story about dread, identity, loneliness, and the way thought can spiral. The book became a film written and directed by Charlie Kaufman.

He followed it with Foe, a near-future novel about Junior and Henrietta, a couple living on an isolated farm after climate damage has reshaped the world around them. A stranger arrives with news that cracks open their marriage, and the story turns questions of personhood and control into suspense. We Spread moves into the mind of an older artist as she enters a long-term care residence where time, memory, and autonomy start to slip. That novel was nominated for the Governor General's Literary Award. Across Reid's fiction, certain things keep returning: enclosed settings, tense relationships, ordinary places that stop feeling safe, and narrators who are never completely sure what is happening.

He has long been based in Kingston, Ontario, and he still spends time at the family farm. That feels fitting. His books may bend genre, but they stay close to home, memory, and the unsettling gap between how well we think we know someone and how much remains hidden.