Terry Fallis Books in Order

If you want his sharp political satire: The Best Laid Plans → The High Road → Operation Angus
If you like workplace and media comedies: Up and Down → No Relation → Poles Apart
If you prefer family stories with heart: One Brother Shy → A New Season
If you are curious about sports and second chances: Albatross
If you want a standalone comic thriller: The Marionette

Terry Fallis writes comic novels that lean into politics, family, and everyday work life, but he comes at them like an engineer, carefully building stories that are smart, warm, and unpretentious.

He grew up in Toronto and studied mechanical and biomedical engineering at McMaster University. On campus he threw himself into student politics, eventually serving as president of the student union, a crash course in meetings, speeches, and the odd bit of behind the scenes drama.

After graduating in the early 1980s, Fallis headed to Ottawa and Queen's Park to work for cabinet ministers and party leaders. Those years as a Liberal strategist, writing speeches and planning campaigns, gave him a front row seat on how Canadian politics really works and, just as important, how it sometimes does not.

In 1995 he moved fully into public relations, co-founding the communications agency Thornley Fallis with a friend and colleague. He built a career helping clients explain complicated ideas in plain language, long before he ever thought of himself as a full time novelist.

Writing fiction started as a side project. On weekends and late nights he drafted The Best Laid Plans, a funny but affectionate satire about a burned out political aide and an unlikely engineering professor turned member of Parliament. When publishers passed, he turned the book into a podcast and self published it, a do it yourself experiment that would quietly change his life.

The novel went on to win a major Canadian humour prize and later the national Canada Reads competition. A traditional publisher picked it up, and the story of Angus McLintock and Daniel Addison was adapted for television and the stage. Suddenly Fallis found himself with both a day job and an audience asking what he would write next.

He has answered that question many times over. The High Road returns to Angus and Daniel as they try to run an honest election campaign. Up and Down follows a former Hill staffer into the world of global public relations and a citizen astronaut scheme. No Relation explores identity and family through a New York copywriter named Earnest Hemmingway who is desperate to be known for more than his famous name.

Other stand alone novels widen the lens. In Poles Apart, a well meaning son launches an anonymous feminist blog while caring for his father above a Florida strip club. One Brother Shy sends a shy Ottawa coder to London and Moscow in search of the twin brother he never knew he had. Albatross tracks a reluctant golf prodigy who would rather be a writer, while Operation Angus drops the Angus McLintock crew into a cloak and dagger race to stop an assassination plot. More recent books like A New Season and The Marionette balance humour with grief, aging, and international intrigue.

Across all of these stories, certain patterns repeat. Fallis gravitates to decent but slightly awkward narrators, the quiet people who end up in over their heads. He likes institutions - Parliament, big agencies, corporate boardrooms - and then imagines what happens when someone inside them chooses honesty and kindness over spin.

An identical twin and longtime ball hockey player, he still lives in Toronto, where he wrote for years while running his communications firm. These days he spends more of his time on novels, speaking at libraries and festivals, and sharing his writing process with readers. The work is serious, but the voice stays light, inviting you to pull up a chair and listen to a good story.