Joan Thomas

Canadian novelist and critic from Manitoba, author of Reading by Lightning, Curiosity, The Opening Sky, and Five Wives; winner of the 2019 Governor General's Award for English-language fiction and the Amazon.ca First Novel Award.

This list of books are ONLY the books that have been ranked on the lists that are aggregated on this site. This is not a comprehensive list of all books by this author.

  1. 1. Five Wives

    In the 1950s, a group of evangelical missionaries sets out to contact an isolated Indigenous community in Ecuador, resulting in the men’s deaths and leaving their wives to reckon with grief and the faith that brought them there. Spanning decades, the story probes the moral complexities of proselytizing, the entanglements of love and duty, and the lingering impact of colonialism on both the families involved and the people they sought to change.

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