Carney shares what’s on his summer reading list

Prime Minister Mark Carney shares his summer reading list, filled with a biography, a novel and a true story.Justin Tang/The Canadian Press

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s summer reading titles include an award-winning true story of a homeless encampment in Toronto and a novel by one of Canada’s most famous astronauts.

In between, there’s a biography of a British chess prodigy who grew into a Nobel Prize-winning tech visionary, central to the development of AI.

Throughout the summer, the Politics Insider newsletter of The Globe and Mail, published on Fridays, has been asking MPs and cabinet ministers about the fiction and non fiction they are reading as the House of Commons is on break.

Among others, Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet, Green Party Leader Elizabeth May, Canadian Identity Minister Marc Miller and Conservative MP Garnett Genuis responded, providing reading lists.

Mr. Carney’s office responded this week. The Prime Minister has been taking some personal time in Italy, though he remains dialled into government business. He is back on Monday.

Audrey Champoux, a spokesperson for Mr. Carney, said he is reading the first two books on the list that follows and is hoping to read the third soon.

1. Encampment: Resistance, Grace, and an Unhoused Community by Maggie Helwig (Coach House Books)

Mr. Carney was at the ceremony in Ottawa earlier this year where Ms. Helwig won the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing. In accepting the prize, Ms. Helwig, an Anglican priest, urged the cabinet ministers, MPs and other leaders in the room to remember the homeless people outside the hotel where the event was held. Ms. Helwig’s non-fiction book recounts events surrounding an encampment of homeless individuals that arose around her Toronto church in 2022. The Cohen judges called the book “a necessary, on-the-ground view of Canada’s homelessness crisis.”

2. The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence by Sebastian Mallaby (Penguin Publishing Group)

This non-fiction book, published earlier this year, traces the life of Mr. Hassabis, a leader in artificial intelligence. Born in London, Mr. Hassabis was a childhood chess prodigy. Later he studied at the University of Cambridge and went on to found the artificial intelligence lab DeepMind, now known as Google DeepMind. In 2024, Hassabis won a Nobel prize with American computer scientist and chemist John Jumper for an AI model that allowed them to predict the structure of virtually all known proteins, and has been used in various areas of research. Earlier this month, Google parent company announced Hassabis, who had become chief of its AI division, would leave his main managerial role.

3. The Apollo Murders: A Novel by Chris Hadfield (Random House of Canada)

This 2021 novel was the first by retired Canadian astronaut Hadfield. He has gone on to write two others. Murders is about a fictional 1973 top-secret U.S. mission to the moon that ends up pitting the United States against the Soviet Union.

The Globe and Mail’s Margaret Cannon said, in a 2021 review, that The Apollo Murders is laden with all sorts of insider space lore and grounded in Mr. Hadfield’s first-hand knowledge of space living. “This thriller moves hard and fast,” she wrote.

The Prime Minister has written his own book, the award-winning 2022 title Value(s): Building a Better World for All, published by McClelland & Stewart. The critique of capitalism calls for markets to answer to citizens.

In a 2021 interview with CBC Radio’s series The Next Chapter, Mr. Carney listed Tom Stoppard, Ian McEwan and James Joyce as his favourite authors.

Other MPs have provided reading lists of books covering a far-flung range of politics, fiction and history.

Among the titles cited by Bloc Québécois Leader Yves-François Blanchet was Rebel Island: The Incredible History of Taiwan by Jonathan Clements, published in 2024 by Scribe Publications Pty Ltd. Mr. Blanchet said in an e-mail that the book is useful for his preparation to take a trip to Taiwan this fall.

Included in Green Party Leader Elizabeth May’s reading list was How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors that Determine the Fate of Every Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration and Everything In Between, by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner. (McClelland & Stewart)

The 2023 book, which Ms. May said she mentioned during an October meeting with the Prime Minister, explores the secrets to successfully planning and delivering ambitious, complex projects on any scale, citing the expertise of the world’s leading experts on megaprojects.

Canadian Identity Minister Marc Miller said his titles included Lévesque/Trudeau: Leur Révolution tranquille, notre histoire (Lévesque/Trudeau: Their Quiet Revolution, our history) by Jean-François Lisée, the former Parti Québécois leader and cabinet minister. The book, published this year by Carte Blanche, is the second volume of a parallel biography of eventual prime minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau and Parti Québécois premier Renée Lévesque.

In a statement, Mr. Miller said of the title that, “I love books that help better understand our history and from different perspectives. Even when I don’t agree with everything, they challenge me to think differently.”

Among the titles selected by Conservative MP Garnett Genuis, the Official Opposition employment critic, was A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind by British academic Michael Axworthy, published in 2007 by Basic Books. Mr. Axworthy died in 2019.

Mr. Genuis said the book was on the table for a history book club he and a number of political people belong to. “It’s a great resource for understanding the breadth of Iran’s history and for seeing how past events have shaped the conflicts of today,” he said in a statement.

Spokespeople for Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre and NDP Leader Avi Lewis said neither would be providing their reading lists.