Latest Work
Cherry Beach
A brutal murder exposes secret real estate deals, a corrupt police force, and the dark heart of a city simmering with unrest.
When two girls are found murdered in a rundown Toronto highrise, Jamieson Abel and his partner are first on the scene. Abel is a law school dropout turned police detective chronically at odds with his colleagues and perpetually on the brink of being terminated, and Davis is the department’s only female officer of colour. Both understand their being partnered as a form of banishment, but when the details of the murder go public at the start of an excruciatingly hot summer, they find themselves thrust into the centre of a front page investigation that will bring to a head the city’s long history of shady real estate deals and racist disenfranchisement.
Intricately plotted and brilliantly layered, Cherry Beach is a gripping literary crime novel that examines class, race, and corruption in the most multicultural city in the world.
On Oil
A journalist, and former roughneck, considers our long, complex, tortured relationship with oil.
Oil has dominated our lives for the last century. It has given us warmth, progress, and life-threatening pollution. It has been a gift and is now a threat. It has started wars, ended wars, and infiltrated governments—in some cases, effectively become the government. And now oil’s enduring mythology is facing a messy, complicated twilight.
In On Oil, Don Gillmor, who worked as a roughneck on oil rigs during the seventies oil boom in Alberta, looks at how the industry has changed over the decades and illustrates the ways our dependence on oil has led to regulatory capture, in Canada and elsewhere, and contributed to armed conflict and war across the world. Gillmor documents the myriad ways that oil companies have misdirected environmental action and misinformed the public about climate concerns and illuminates where we went wrong—and how we might yet change course.
About
Don Gillmor is an award-winning Canadian novelist, journalist and children's book author.
His 2024 non-fiction book On Oil examines our long, tortured history with oil, its enduring mythology and messy, complicated twliight.
His novel 2023 novel Breaking and Entering examines the life of a 50-year-old woman who deals with her mid-life crisis by breaking into houses. The New York Times called it “thrilling and relatable.” It was both a Globe and Mail Best Books and an Oprah Winfrey Best Books of 2023 and was nominated for the Republic of Consciousness Prize (US)
His previous book, To the River (2018, Random House) explores his brother’s suicide. It won the 2019 Governor General’s Literary Award for non-fiction and was a CBC Best Books of 2019.
His novel Long Change (2015, Random House) examines the world of oil through the life and loves of one man; both stories are epic.
His previous novel, Mount Pleasant (2013, Random House), is a darkly comic meditation on privilege and debt set in contemporary Toronto, and his first novel, the critically acclaimed Kanata (2009, Penguin), dealt with the whole sweep of Canadian history. He is also the author of a two-volume history of Canada, Canada: A People’s History, and three other books of non-fiction, The Desire of Every Living Thing, Stratford Behind the Scenes, and I Swear by Apollo.
He has written nine books for children, two of which were nominated for a Governor General’s Award. His journalism and criticism have appeared in The Walrus, where he was a senior editor; Saturday Night and Toronto Life, where he was a contributing editor; and Rolling Stone, GQ, The Globe and Mail and The Toronto Star, among other publications. He has won 12 National Magazine Awards and numerous other honours. He lives in Toronto.