Lawrence Hill
Lawrence Hill has published 11 books across 3 series. The recommended reading order starts with Some Great Thing (1992).
Lawrence Hill is a Canadian author who writes novels and nonfiction, much of it shaped by questions of identity and mixed-race experience. His parents were a mixed-race couple who left Washington, D.C. for Canada in 1953, and that family history runs through his work. He grew up in Don Mills, Ontario, writing his first story at fourteen on his mother's typewriter after setting aside an earlier dream of becoming an Olympic runner.
Hill earned a B.A. in economics from Laval University in Quebec City and an M.A. in writing from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He made his debut as a novelist in 1992 with Some Great Thing, and has since published the novels Any Known Blood and Someone Knows My Name. He has also worked as a journalist and co-authored the nonfiction book The Deserter's Tale with Joshua Key.
His writing and teaching have taken him across Canada, as well as to Baltimore, Spain, and France. He now splits his time between Hamilton, Ontario and Woody Point, Newfoundland, where he lives with his family.
Shelf & Shadows
Order of Anthologies
- DescriptionTen Canadian Writers in Context draws from a decade of Brown Bag Lunch readings at the Canadian Literature Centre to gather fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from ten writers working across the country. Each selection is paired with a critical essay written by a scholar, creating a point of entry into how that author thinks and works. The anthology spans geography — Newfoundland to British Columbia's Kitamaat territory — and crosses languages, with pieces in English, French, and Cree. The writers come from different backgrounds and write in different forms, but each essay addresses the same challenge: what drives this author's work, and how do they do what they do. Ying Chen, Lynn Coady, Michael Crummey, Caterina Edwards, Marina Endicott, Lawrence Hill, Alice Major, Eden Robinson, Gregory Scofield, and Kim Thúy are the voices chosen from the archive. The essays by Julie Rodgers, Maïté Snauwaert, Jennifer Bowering Delisle, Joseph Pivato, Daniel Laforest, Winfried Siemerling, Don Perkins, Kit Dobson, Angela Van Essen, and Pamela V. Sing offer analysis for readers who want to understand what they are reading, and for teachers and students looking for a way into the work. Published in 2016 as part of the Order of Anthologies series, the book also connects to a digital archive of the recorded readings.Publication dateNovember 4, 2016Amazon rating4/5Print length217LanguageEnglishPublisherThe University of Alberta Press
Order of Non-Fiction Books
- Tags---DescriptionTrials and Triumphs is a 62-page entry in the Order of Non-Fiction Books series, first published in 1993.Publication dateMarch 1, 1993Amazon rating4/5Print length62LanguageEnglishPublisherUmbrella Pr
- Tagsnon-fictionDescriptionWomen of Vision, published in 1996, profiles notable figures across 96 pages in the Order of Non-Fiction Books series.Publication dateJune 30, 1996Amazon rating3/5Print length96LanguageEnglishPublisherUmbrella Press
- TagschildrenDescriptionBlack Berry, Sweet Juice is a 2002 memoir about growing up with a black father and white mother in a country that prefers to see its mixed-race citizens as neither one nor the other. Lawrence Hill was raised by human rights activists in a predominantly white Ontario suburb, and this book traces his search for a personal and racial identity in a society that offers no clear vocabulary or place for people like him. Hill weaves his own family history with interviews from thirty-six other Canadians of mixed race, examining the terms used to describe children born across the color line, the hostility directed at interracial couples, and what it means to claim a black Canadian identity when the world reads your body differently depending on the room you walk into. The book arrives during the national controversy over Elijah Van de Perre, a child of mixed race at the center of a Supreme Court custody battle in British Columbia. The question Hill carries through every chapter is whether Canada can make space for an identity it has long refused to name — and whether he can build one for himself without waiting for permission.Publication dateDecember 9, 2002Amazon rating4.5/5Print length264LanguageEnglishPublisherHarper Perennial
- Tagsmemoirnon-fictionDescriptionThe Deserter's Tale is a memoir by Joshua Key, the first published account from a soldier who deserted from the war in Iraq. In spring 2003, Key, a young Oklahoman, deployed to Ramadi with a combat engineer company expecting a campaign against terrorists. What he found was a war in which Iraqi civilians were beaten, shot, and killed for little or no provocation. He witnessed the grinding reality of an occupying force, a daily violence that bore no resemblance to the mission he had believed in. After seven months in Iraq, Key returned home on leave and knew he could not go back. He took his wife and children underground in the United States, spending fourteen months in hiding before seeking asylum in Canada. The memoir traces the transformation of a conservative-minded patriot who trusted his government without question into a man who could no longer serve his country. The question at the heart of the book is what happens when the war a soldier is asked to fight becomes the war he cannot morally survive.Publication dateDecember 21, 2007Amazon rating4/5Print length256LanguageEnglishPublisherGrove Press
- Tagsnon-fictionDescriptionBlood: The Stuff of Life is a work of nonfiction that examines how one biological substance has shaped human identity across centuries. Blood performs identical functions in every body, and its study has advanced medicine and biology. Yet its cultural meanings have divided people by race, gender, class, and nation. The book traces blood through religion, literature, and art, showing how each spill and pool has revealed what unites and separates us. The inquiry deepens when Hill turns to blood purity: the idea that difference flows through our veins. That belief has determined who belongs to a family, who claims citizenship, who inherits wealth or rule, and who gets excluded. It has defined fair play in sport and drawn borders around national identity. The question Blood poses is whether we can see past the meanings we have assigned to this red fluid and recognize what it actually shares across every human being, or whether the divisions it has marked will continue to define who we are.Publication dateOctober 26, 2013Amazon rating4.1/5Print length272LanguageEnglishPublisherHouse of Anansi Press
- DescriptionDear Sir, I Intend to Burn Your Book is a 2013 essay that begins with an act of protest: a group in the Netherlands burned the cover of The Book of Negroes in 2011, objecting to the title of a novel that had found wide success. The book examines what drives such reactions in an era when information flows freely online, and whether censorship or control of book distribution can ever be defended. Hill draws on his own experience as the target of that protest, then widens the lens to Canadian writers who faced similar challenges in the twenty-first century, building a case through anecdote and example rather than polemic. The essay invites conversation between those who defend unrestricted expression and those who believe some ideas warrant suppression. It asks why books still provoke fear and fury when so much else competes for attention, and what that intensity reveals about the power of the printed word. The question it leaves open is whether any middle ground exists between absolute freedom and the impulse to silence what disturbs us.Publication dateMarch 20, 2013Amazon rating4.3/5Print length56LanguageEnglishPublisherUniversity of Alberta Press
Order of Standalone Novels
- TagscrimeDescriptionMahatma Grafton returns to his hometown after four years of college with no direction and less conviction, ready to coast through a job at the local newspaper. Some Great Thing is a novel about the people who won't let him. An unlikely welfare crusader, an exchange student from Cameroon, and a French language rights activist pull him into their fights, and their commitment begins to wake something in him he didn't know was missing. Then a peaceful demonstration turns into a full-scale riot. The police move to cover it up, and Mahatma finds himself in the middle of a story that demands more than observation. The novel moves between the editorial desk and the streets, tracking a young reporter who has spent years avoiding principles as he stumbles toward the ones worth holding. The question is whether discovering what matters is enough to act on it.Publication dateJanuary 1, 1992Amazon rating4.3/5Print length240LanguageEnglishPublisherTurnstone Pr
- Tags---DescriptionAny Known Blood is a novel that follows Langston Cane V, a thirty-eight-year-old government speechwriter who loses his job after sabotaging his minister's speech. Divorced and suddenly unmoored, Langston decides to trace his family history, searching for the past of five generations who navigated the border between black and white, Canada and America, freedom and bondage. The search takes him from the slave trade of nineteenth-century Virginia to Oakville, Ontario, a suburb that once served as a final stop on the Underground Railroad. Langston is the son of a white mother and a prominent black father, and as he unearths the voices of ancestors who survived passage and migration, he confronts what their choices and silences mean for his own fractured sense of identity. The deeper he digs, the more he must reckon with whether knowing where he comes from can tell him who he is meant to become.Publication dateDecember 2, 2008Amazon rating4.1/5Print length528LanguageEnglishPublisherHarperCollins Publishers
- DescriptionAminata Diallo is kidnapped from her West African village at age eleven and enslaved on an indigo plantation in South Carolina. The Book of Negroes follows her survival across decades and continents, as she draws on the midwifery skills her mother taught her and a strength inherited from both parents. When the Revolutionary War breaks out, she escapes the chaos and reaches Manhattan, where the British hire her as a scribe to record the names of Black Loyalists in a historic military ledger — the Book of Negroes — granting three thousand people passage to Nova Scotia and freedom. But Nova Scotia brings hardship and prejudice instead of refuge. Aminata's journey turns toward Africa, then to London, where she bears witness to the injustices of slavery and its toll on her life and the lives of a whole people. The novel spans an African village, a Southern plantation, a soured colony, the coast of Sierra Leone, and the heart of the British Empire. The question it carries through every mile is whether freedom on paper can ever become freedom in fact.Publication dateNovember 17, 2008Amazon rating4.6/5Print length486LanguageEnglishPublisherW. W. Norton & Company
- Tagsdystopianthrillerliterary-fictioncrimesci-fiDescriptionKeita Ali runs to survive, and now he must run for his life. The Illegal is a political thriller about a refugee marathoner hiding in a country determined to deport him. Keita fled Zantoroland after his journalist father was killed for his political views. The island nation produces the fastest marathoners in the world, and Keita signed with a ruthless agent who promised him a shot at the Boston Marathon in exchange for most of the prize money. When he fails to place, he goes underground in Freedom State, a wealthy nation whose new government has launched a crackdown on undocumented refugees living in the community of AfricTown. Keita surfaces only to run local road races for cash, moving constantly to stay ahead of deportation officers and the agent who still wants his cut. Each person he meets could turn him in or help him disappear: a student filmmaker documenting AfricTown, an elderly woman facing her own displacement, a reporter investigating corruption between the two governments, and the immigration minister himself, who runs marathons for fun. Keita's sister has been kidnapped back home, and the ransom depends on him staying free long enough to win. He is running for her life now, and for his own.Publication dateJanuary 25, 2016Amazon rating3.9/5Print length400LanguageEnglishPublisherW. W. Norton & Company
Frequently Asked Questions about Lawrence Hill
Lawrence Hill's books can be read in any order. He has not written series that require sequential reading. His novels and non-fiction works stand on their own. If you are looking for a chronological approach to his career, you might start with his earliest published works and move forward. His debut novel, Some Great Thing, was published in 1992. His non-fiction book Trials and Triumphs also appeared in 1993. Reading his books in publication order offers a way to trace the development of his writing and thematic interests over time.
A good starting point for Lawrence Hill is The Book of Negroes, also published as Someone Knows My Name. This novel, published in 2008, won the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best Book. It tells the story of Aminata Diallo, an enslaved woman who navigates the complexities of the transatlantic slave trade and seeks freedom. The novel has been widely read and adapted for television. It showcases Hill's skill in historical fiction and his commitment to exploring narratives of Black history.
No, you do not have to read Lawrence Hill's books in any particular order. He writes primarily standalone novels and non-fiction books. While some of his novels share thematic connections or explore aspects of Black history and identity, they are designed to be read independently. You can pick up any of his titles and understand the story or subject matter without having read others. This allows readers the flexibility to explore his work based on their interests.
Lawrence Hill writes standalone novels and non-fiction books. He has not published any series. Each of his novels, such as Any Known Blood, The Book of Negroes, and The Illegal, can be read as a complete and independent story. His non-fiction works also address distinct subjects. Readers can engage with any of his books without needing to follow a specific sequence or worry about missing plot points from previous installments.
Lawrence Hill has written at least ten books. This includes four standalone novels: Some Great Thing, Any Known Blood, The Book of Negroes / Someone Knows My Name, and The Illegal. He has also published six non-fiction books: Trials and Triumphs, Women of Vision, Black Berry, Sweet Juice, The Deserter's Tale, and Blood. His anthology Order of Anthologies: Ten Canadian Writers in Context also features his work. This count does not include any potential future publications.
Lawrence Hill's first published book was the novel Some Great Thing, which was released in 1992. This marked his debut as an author. Following this, his non-fiction book Trials and Triumphs was published in 1993. Some Great Thing explores themes of identity and belonging. The publication of Some Great Thing established Hill's presence in Canadian literature. Readers interested in his early work can begin with this novel to see the foundation of his literary career.
Lawrence Hill's most recent book is The Illegal, published in 2016. This novel is a work of fiction that tells the story of Antonio, a man who flees his home country due to political persecution and seeks refuge in a fictionalized alternate reality of the United States. The book explores themes of immigration, justice, and systemic inequality. It has been widely read and discussed since its release, highlighting Hill's continued engagement with significant social and political issues through his writing.
Lawrence Hill writes novels and non-fiction books. His novels often engage with history, identity, and social justice, particularly focusing on the experiences of Black people. He has written historical fiction, such as The Book of Negroes, and contemporary fiction that addresses issues like immigration and political asylum, as seen in The Illegal. His non-fiction works cover a range of topics, including family history, race, and social issues, demonstrating a consistent interest in exploring complex human experiences and societal challenges.
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Kiese Laymon
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We verified the reading order for Lawrence Hill's books by cross-referencing official publication dates, ISBN databases, and publisher catalogs.
Last verified: July 2026
Shelf & Shadows. (…). “Lawrence Hill Books in Order.” Retrieved …, from https://www.shelfandshadows.com/authors/lawrence-hill