Locals sweep McNally’s top non-fiction sales

Winnipeg broadcaster Scott Oake took top spot in McNally Robinson Booksellers’ list of the bestselling non-fiction titles of 2025 — with the top five all hailing from Manitoba.

Published in January, Oake’s For the Love of a Son, about his late son Bruce’s struggles with addiction, his subsequent death and the rise of the Bruce Oake Recovery Centre, was the bookstore’s top non-fiction title.

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David A. Robertson’s 52 Ways to Reconcile, published in May, landed in the number two spot, one of two titles by the Swampy Cree author on the list (the other being his memoir All the Little Monsters, at the number four spot).

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Rounding out the top five was Miriam Toews’ A Truce That Is Not Peace in third place and Jennifer Jones’ memoir Rock Star in fifth place.

Four of the five biggest selling fiction titles were written by Canadians, with Louise Penny’s The Black Wolf nabbing the top spot followed by Chris Hadfield’s Final Orbit, Carley Fortune’s One Golden Summer, Sweden’s Frederik Backman with My Friends and Souvankham Thammavongsa rounding out the quintet with the Giller Prize-winning Pick a Colour.

For more notable numbers from the store, see the social media post at wfp.to/iOi.

On a national level, sales by Canadian authors at independent bookstores were topped by Omar El Akkad’s National Book Award-winning non-fiction title One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, according to a story at Quill & Quire.

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Data for the top sales was gathered from 265 independent bookstores across Canada by Bookmanager for the period between Jan. 1 and Dec. 1. The rest of the top five included, in descending order, Penny’s The Black Wolf, Mark Carney’s Values: Building a Better World for All, One Golden Summer by Fortuneand The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus by Emma Knight.

When looking solely at Canadian publishers, Waubgeshig Rice’s 2018 novel Moon of the Crusted Snow topped the list for the second year in a row, followed by, in descending order, Dandelion by Jamie Chai Yun Liew, Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves, Iona Whishaw’s The Cost of a Hostage: A Lane Winslow Mystery and the CBC Canada Reads winner A Two-Spirit Journey: The Autobiography of a Lesbian Ojibwa-Cree Elder, written by Ma-Nee Chacaby with Mary Louisa Plummer and published by University of Manitoba Press.

The top 25 sellers in both categories can be seen on the Quill & Quire website at wfp.to/iOk.

Forty Canadian authors have banded together in support of the group Book Clubs for Inmates in the hopes of helping raise money for the group over the holidays.

Among the participating authors are Margaret Atwood, Heather O’Neill, Carol Off, Ann-Marie MacDonald, John Irving, Tanya Talaga, Stephanie Sinclair and Winnipeg’s David A. Robertson.

Book Clubs for Inmates encourages literacy for those who are incarcerated in the hopes of helping them, as the website says, “develop empathy, listening skills, and self-awareness.” The group organizes book clubs in Canadian federal penitentiaries, both in French and English.

Donations to Book Clubs for Inmates go towards providing new books for inmates, funding author visits to book clubs and more. Tax receipts are available when appropriate.

For more information see bookclubsforinmates.com, or see the Instagram account @bookclubsforinmates for video testimonials by the participating authors (as well as books that transformed their lives).

winnipegfreepress.com/bensigurdson