Margaret Laurence Books in Order

Laurence’s first book collects Somali poems, songs, stories, and prose that she translated and gathered while living in Africa. It opens a window onto oral tradition and shows the curiosity that shaped her later work.

Set in Ghana during a time of political and social change, the novel follows schoolteacher Nathaniel Amegbe as he struggles with pride, ambition, and self-doubt. Laurence uses his story to show a society shifting under everyone’s feet.

This is the American edition of Laurence’s Somaliland memoir, later known as The Prophet’s Camel Bell. She writes about desert life, cultural distance, and the limits of outsider understanding with honesty and sharp observation.

In this memoir of British Somaliland, Laurence writes about desert travel, daily life, and the uneasy realities of colonial rule. It is part travel book, part self-examination, and full of close attention to the people around her.

These West African stories follow teachers, officials, families, and children caught in moments of change. Laurence keeps the stakes human and local, showing how power, faith, and ordinary longing meet in everyday life.

At ninety, Hagar Shipley looks back on a hard, proud life in and beyond Manawaka while resisting the loss of her independence. Laurence turns memory, family conflict, and old age into something fierce and intimate.

James W. Nichol’s stage adaptation reshapes Laurence’s novel for the theatre while keeping Hagar Shipley at the center. Her last, stubborn bid for independence unfolds through scenes from old age and memory.

Rachel Cameron is a thirty-four-year-old schoolteacher in Manawaka, hemmed in by routine and her demanding mother. A summer affair unsettles her careful life and forces her to face loneliness, desire, and the possibility of change.

Laurence surveys Nigerian novelists and playwrights writing in English during years of major change. It is a lively critical study, shaped by her deep interest in African literature and the pressures of history on art.

This is the Panther edition of A Jest of God. Rachel Cameron, a lonely Manawaka schoolteacher, is jolted out of routine by a brief affair that makes her confront fear, desire, and the shape of the life she has accepted.

Stacey MacAindra, a mother of four living in Vancouver, feels trapped between domestic routine and private panic. As small crises pile up, she searches for some steadier way to live inside fear, marriage, and modern city life.

Jason, a young mole, sets out to find the cause and cure of a strange sickness spreading through Molanium. It is an unusual children’s fantasy, warm, inventive, and driven by curiosity, courage, and underground adventure.

In these linked stories, Vanessa MacLeod remembers growing up in Manawaka and learning how family love, grief, religion, and class shape a life. It reads like a novel in pieces, intimate, sharp-eyed, and quietly devastating.

Writer Morag Gunn looks back on her prairie childhood, her loves, and the stories that made her. It is a big, searching novel about memory, identity, art, and the difficult work of claiming your own voice.

This essay collection brings together Laurence’s personal and public voice in pieces about travel, writing, politics, censorship, and belonging. The essays feel conversational, but they keep pressing at larger questions about home and responsibility.

When Sal discovers her grandmother’s old coat, Christmas opens into memory, story, and a brush with the past. It is a short children’s tale about grief, family, and the comfort that tradition can carry.

Laurence retells the Nativity for young readers in clear, direct language. It follows the birth of Jesus and the visit of the three kings, aiming for warmth, wonder, and a sense of the story’s human scale.

In this posthumous memoir, Laurence writes about her life, her work, and the women who shaped her. The book mixes remembrance with letters, speeches, and reflections on writing, family, and the causes she cared about.

This collection of letters to fellow Canadian writers shows Laurence at work on the page and in literary friendship. The letters are candid, funny, worried, generous, and full of practical talk about writing and publishing.

This posthumous collection gathers Laurence’s early poems and stories from her school and college years. You can already see the beginnings of the concerns that would later define her fiction, memory, place, loss, and voice.

These letters trace a long friendship between two writers who read, encouraged, and challenged each other over decades. The collection offers a close look at Laurence’s daily life, literary doubts, and working habits.

This volume gathers the letters between Margaret Laurence and Gabrielle Roy, two major Canadian writers who were close at a distance. Their correspondence is affectionate, thoughtful, and revealing about art, reading, and solitude.

This collection brings together Laurence’s short nonfiction, including essays, reviews, addresses, and occasional pieces. It shows how widely she thought and how directly she wrote about literature, Canada, politics, and the writer’s job.