Buy Canadian
Publisher: Simon & Schuster of Canada
Published: January 1976
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 159
ISBN-13: 9780671802080
Subjects: Novel
Genres: satirical romance
Description: This novel was inspired by Margaret Atwood's "Survival," which claims that Canada and Canadians suffer from a victim complex. Barclay took issue with this and decided to write a popular novel about a heroine who is decidedly NOT a victim.  She is also a Canadian nationalist, who opens a specialty store designed to make buying genuinely made-in-Canada products a practical reality.  Disaster threatens when the store's best-selling artist is revealed as an American.  

Meanwhile, Barclay's heroine, Vi, is romantically entangled with Horace, an apolitical mugwump who insists she marry him despite her determination to do nothing of the sort.  Barclay handles her political and romantic satire with a deft and racy style that engages the reader from the start. "Buy Canadian" is a slight story, published as a paperback original in 1976 and not reprinted since, but it remains one of the very few examples of a Canadian novel with a nationalist theme. It is therefore of sociological and historical interest as well as lighthearted entertainment .