Don Gillmor is a novelist, journalist, and children’s book author. His most recent non-fiction book, On Oil, was shortlisted for the 2026 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for the best Canadian political book. His festival novel, Cherry Beach, was shortlisted for the 2026 Toronto Book Award. His 2023 novel, Breaking and Entering, was both a Globe and Mail and Oprah Winfrey Best Book. His memoir To the River, which explores his brother’s suicide, won the 2019 Governor General’s Literary Award for Nonfiction. Other books include Long Change, Mount Pleasant, Kanata, and nine books for children, two of which were nominated for Governor General’s Literary Awards.
Gillmor’s journalism and criticism have appeared in The Walrus, Saturday Night, Toronto Life, Rolling Stone, GQ, The Globe and Mail, and The Toronto Star, among other publications. He has won 12 National Magazine Awards, along with the Prix Jean-Charles Page (for medical journalism), two Western Magazine Awards, and one National Newspaper Award. His two-volume companion to CBC Television’s award-winning Canada: A People’s History won the prestigious Libris Award in 2001. He lives in Toronto.
“In a short, incisive, at times rollicking book, [Don Gillmor] takes us from the drilling floor (he was a roughneck in the 1970s) to the capitulation of our government to industry under premiers Klein and Smith (most notably) to a glimpse of ‘the road to a viable future.” –Alberta Views
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 ’70s 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.
“Gillmor really knows his stuff—in a dazzling range of areas. A layered portrait of a changing city in the guise of a gripping crime novel, for fans of Tana French and Dennis Lehane.” –Kirkus Reviews
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.
In the spirit of reconciliation, we acknowledge that we live, work and play on the traditional territories of the Blackfoot Confederacy (Siksika, Kainai, Piikani), the Tsuut’ina, the Iyarhe Nakoda Nations, the Otipemisiwak Métis Government of the Métis Nation within Alberta District 6, and all people who make their homes in the Treaty 7 region of Southern Alberta.
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