David Chariandry’s Brother (M&S)
Rachel Cusk’s Transit (HarperCollins)
David Denchuk’s The Bone Mother (ChiZine)
Joel Thomas Hynes We’ll All Be Burnt in Our Beds Some Night (HarperCollins)
Andrée A. Michaud’s Boundary: The Last Summer (Trans. Donald Winkler) (Biblioasis)
Josip Novakovich’s Tumbleweed (Véhicule)
Ed O’Loughlin’s Minds of Winter (Anansi)
Zoey Leigh Peterson’s Next Year for Sure (Doubleday)
Michael Redhill’s Bellevue Square (Doubleday)
Eden Robinson’s Son of a Trickster (Knopf)
Deborah Willis’ The Dark and Other Love Stories (Hamish Hamilton)
Michelle Winters’ I Am a Truck (Invisible)
The 2017 Giller jury (André Alexis, Anita Rau Badami, Richard Beard, Lynn Coady and Nathan Englander) has selected twelve books, including short stories and fresh voices, unconventional styles and a work in translation, even a horror novel!
Altough the shortlist will be announced on October 2nd, before I will have had a chance to read through the list, I plan to read the longlist anyhow. If I manage to finish reading before the winner is announced on November 20th, I will privately offer it a lovely rose.
A rose from a reader.
Reading the 2017 Giller Prize Longlist
Guessing at each book’s Giller-a-bility
The last time the Giller longlist so tickled me was 2011. Back then, the jury (Howard Norman, Annabel Lyon and Andrew O’Hagan) introduced me to Michael Christie, Patrick deWitt and Alexi Zentner, and urged me to read – finally – Clark Blaise, Esi Edugyan, Pauline Holdstock, Dany Laferriere and Guy Vanderhaeghe.
Recent Prizelist and Event Reading
November 2017
Michael Redhill’s Bellevue Spiral (2017)
Whether or not it's 50%, there is a part of Michael Redhill who is Inger Ash Wolfe; he has published four mysteries using this
October 2017
David Chariandy’s Brother (2017)
Though set further north of the bluffs, David Chariandy's follow-up to his debut Soucouyant is every bit as family-soaked, its losses and sorrows cast
Josip Novakovich’s Tumbleweed (2017)
As you might have guessed, the characters in Tumbleweed are always in motion. Sometimes literally, as with a hitchhiker in the title story, who
Deborah Willis’ The Dark and Other Love Stories (2017)
Delicate and deliberate, these stories are sometimes startling and always moving. In some, the darkness is overt and inescapable; in others, quietly pervasive and creeping.
Autumn 2017 In My Reading Log (Non-fiction and Not-quite-fiction)
In which there is talk of true stories and stories that fall between the cracks of imagined facts and probabilities. Kyo Maclear's Birds Art Life
Catherine Hernandez’s Scarborough (2017)
To begin with, young Laura is rushed into packing her things into plastic bags. Just a few pages later, Sylvie is thrust into "double-time
Even when I didn’t live in Toronto, I still watched this prizelist for books set in the city that I hoped to call home someday.
The International Festival of Authors brought me to Toronto many times before I actually moved to the city. It remains a favourite!
The ReLit Awards peer more closely at the books that are sometimes overlooked, those from smaller and independent presses.