Governor General's Literary Awards, Fiction - WinnersUnpublished

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Life Before Man vividly portrays three people in thrall to the tragicomedy some call love. Imprisoned by walls of their own construction, they are forced to make drastic choices--after the rules have changed and the boundaries have become faded. There is Elizabeth, with her controlled...

It is the world of the near future, and Offred is a Handmaid in the home of the Commander and his wife. She is allowed out once a day to the food market, she is not permitted to read, and she is hoping the Commander makes her pregnant, because she is only valued if her ovaries are viable. Offred can...

Winner of the Governor General's Award for Fiction. Peter Behrens's bestselling novel is gorgeously written, Homeric in scope, and haunting in its depiction of a young man's perilous journey from innocence to experience. The Law of Dreamsfollows Fergus O'Brien from Ireland to Liverpool and...

Winner of the 2013 Man Booker Prize and Governor General's Award for Fiction, and set during the heady days of New Zealand's Gold Rush, The Luminaries is a magnificent novel of love, lust, murder, and greed, in which three unsolved crimes link the fates and fortunes of twelve men...

Winner of the Governor General Award for Fiction, Elizabeth and After is a final parting gift from the talented Matt Cohen, delivering this haunting tale of love, loss, family and grief.      Ever since the death of his mother, Elizabeth...

The second novel in the critically acclaimed Deptford Trilogy and winner of the Governor General's Award for Fiction, The Manticore is a masterful work by one of Canada's literary greats.   David Staunton, the successful son of Percy Boyd Staunton, is haunted by his...

Winner of the Governor General's Award for Fiction, the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, the Prix des libraires du Quebec and the Stephen Leacock Medal. Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and the Walter Scott Prize. Hermann Kermit Warm is going to die:...

Drawing on both lived experience and cultural memory, Norma Dunning brings together six powerful new short stories centred on modern-day Inuk characters in Tainna. Ranging from homeless to extravagantly wealthy, from spiritual to jaded, young to elderly, and even from alive to...

Controversial, unsettling, shocking. This is the story of a 27-year-old, lonely, woman who, alone on an island, who discovers an obsessive passion--one that breaks an ancient taboo and that could very well become deadly. "A quietly sensual, feminist story."--The New Yorker

Robert Ross, a sensitive nineteen-year-old Canadian officer, went to war--The War to End All Wars. He found himself in the nightmare world of trench warfare, of mud and smoke, of chlorine gas and rotting corpses. In this world gone mad, Robert Ross performed a last desperate act to declare his...

Winner of the 2005 Governor General's Award for Fiction This astonishing novel - unlike anything Gilmour has ever written before - begins with every parent's worst nightmare: the disappearance of a child. A father makes a casual error of judgement one evening and...

Winner, Governor General's Award for Fiction Shortlisted, IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and Commonwealth Writers' Prize A 16th-century belle turned Robinson Crusoe, a female Don Quixote with an Inuit Sancho Panza -- this is the heroine of the novel that won the 2003 Governor...

WINNER: Canada Reads 2022 WINNER: Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction WINNER: Amazon First Novel Award WINNER: Kobo Emerging Author Prize  Finalist: Scotiabank Giller Prize Finalist: Atwood Gibson Writers Trust Prize Finalist: BC & Yukon...

Winner of the 2018 Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction The battle of the sexes goes to college in this nervy debut adult novel by a powerful new voice A smart, dark, and take-no-prisoners look at rape culture and the extremes to which ideology can go...

"True and newly alive." --Los Angeles Times "One-of-a-kind. . . . nothing less than vital." --The Guardian A new novel about art, love, death and time from the author of Motherhood and How Should A Person Be? Named a most anticipated...

When an unknown woman steps off a beached Peruvian freighter and walks into the Vancouver Island town of Port Annie, nothing can ever be quite the same. Stalwart citizens, tired of their milltown routine, grasp at a fresh subject for gossip. Others are suddenly prepared to make momentous decisions....

A blackly comic and heart-rending odyssey by the inimitable author of Down to the Dirt Scrappy tough guy and three-time loser Johnny Keough is going a little stir-crazy awaiting trial for an alleged assault charge involving his girlfriend, Madonna, and a teapot. Facing three to five...

Winner of the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction Winner of the Sunburst Award Winner of the Copper Cylinder Adult Award Finalist for the Trillium Book Award Finalist for the CBC Bookie Awards Longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award ...

The culmination and completion of Margaret Laurence's celebrated Manawaka cycle, The Diviners is an epic novel, now available as a Penguin Modern Classic. This is the powerful story of an independent woman who refuses to abandon her search for love. For Morag Gunn, growing...

In this celebrated novel, Margaret Laurence writes with grace, power, and deep compassion about Rachel Cameron, a woman struggling to come to terms with love, with death, with herself and her world. Trapped in a milieu of deceit and pettiness – her own and that of others –...

Seven stories and novellas by the author of Under the Volcano, a master of twentieth-century fiction.   For fans of the novel Under the Volcano, this collection of stories--many of them published for the first time posthumously--provides great insight into...

Winner of the Governor General's Award for Fiction Canada Reads Selection (CBC), 2013 A landmark of nationalist fiction, Hugh MacLennan's Two Solitudes is the story of two peoples within one nation, each with its own legend and ideas of what a nation should be. In his vivid...

George and Catherine Stewart share not only the burden of Catherine's heart disease, which could cause her death at any time, but the memory of Jerome Martell, her first husband and George's closest friend. Martel, a brilliant doctor passionately concerned with social justice, is presumed to...

The great Canadian novel of the Second World War in Italy, winner of the 1958 Governor General’s Award Lieutenant John Adam, recovering from wounds sustained in the Italian campaign of 1943, faces a terrible dilemma when he finds that one his men, a volunteer, is to...

It is Bombay in 1971, the year India went to war over what was to become Bangladesh. A hard-working bank clerk, Gustad Noble is a devoted family man who gradually sees his modest life unravelling. His young daughter falls ill; his promising son defies his father’s ambitions for him. He is the...

“No, for wasn’t this the chance he had always wanted? Wasn’t he at long last an adventurer, a man who had gambled all on one horse, a horse coloured Canada, which now by hook or by crook would carry him to fame and fortune?” Meet Ginger Coffey, the...

In the stories that make up Dance of the Happy Shades, the deceptive calm of small-town life is brought memorably to the page, revealing the countryside of Southwestern Ontario to be home to as many small sufferings and unanticipated emotions as any place. This is the book that earned Alice...

With the ease and mastery that have won extraordinary acclaim for her writing, these eleven stories by Alice Munro explore the most intimate and transforming moments of experience--moments when the shape of life is set, moments of realization about the burden, the power, and the nature of love.<...

Rose and her stepmother, Flo, live in Hanratty-across the bridge from the "good" part of town. Rose, alternately fascinated and appalled by the rude energy of the people around her, grows up nursing her hope of outgrowing her humble beginnings and plotting an escape to university. Rose makes her...

Winning a Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction, the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize and the Scotiabank Giller Prize, Anil's Ghost is another award-winning novel from Michael Ondaatje. Steeped in centuries of cultural achievement and tradition, Sri Lanka has been ravaged...

From the celebrated author of The English Patient and In the Skin of a Lion comes a remarkable novel of intersecting lives that ranges across continents and time. In the 1970s in northern California, near Gold Rush country, a father and his teenage daughters, Anna and...

With ravishing beauty and unsettling intelligence, Michael Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning novel traces the intersection of four damaged lives in an Italian villa at the end of World War II. Hana, the exhausted nurse; the maimed thief, Caravaggio; the wary sapper, Kip: each is haunted by the riddle...

Kate Pullinger's Governor General's Literary Award-winning novel about a lady, her maid and the man that comes between them. Lady Duff Gordon is the toast of Victorian London society but when she contracts tuberculosis, she and her devoted lady's maid, Sally, set sail for Egypt and an entirely...

Des Howell is a former rock 'n' roll star who never leaves his secluded oceanfront mansion. Naked, rich and fabulously deranged, he subsists on a steady diet of whiskey, pharmaceuticals and jelly doughnuts and occasionally works on his masterpiece, "Whale Music." One day, upon awakening from his...

When young Vittorio Innocente's mother, Cristina, is bitten by a snake during an encounter with a blue-eyed stranger in the family barn, the superstitions and prejudices rampant in their small Italian town immediately roil to the surface. But the worst is yet to come for the independent-minded...

Set in Montreal in 1986, The Origin of Species is the story of a thirty-something Alex Fratarcangeli ("I can't even pronounce it myself," he admits to an acquaintance), plagued by a familiar sense of being a fraud in all aspects of his life from his professional ambitions to his romantic...

David Adams Richards' Governor General's Award-winning novel is a powerful tale of resignation and struggle, fierce loyalties and compassion. This book is the first in Richards' acclaimed Miramichi trilogy. Set in a small mill town in northern New Brunswick, it draws us into the lives of a community...

St. Urbain's Horseman is a complex, moving, and wonderfully comic evocation of a generation consumed with guilt--guilt at not joining every battle, at not healing every wound. Thirty-seven-year-old Jake Hersh is a film director of modest success, a faithful husband, and a man in...

A tour de force of inventive wit Shakespeare's Dog is the eccentric and high-spirited story of William Shakespeare and how he came to bed and wed Anne Hathaway. Told from the point of view of the Bard's dog, this astonishing novel of comic bliss, hailed as a triumph of language and...

A compelling semi-autobiographical record told through fiction, Gabrielle Roy remembers and retells her stories from young girl to aspiring author, and the things she learns in between...      The eighteen stories in Gabrielle Roy's Street...

An affecting story of familial tenderness, sacrifice, and survival, The Tin Flute is imbued with Roy's unique brand of compassion and compelling understanding. The first among her repertoire of award-winning novels, The Tin Flute is Gabrielle Roy's sympathetic novel...

As Sawai deftly turns over the stones of these people's lives and reveals the squalor, the fear and the unhappiness that lie beneath, she also uncovers that most precious of human qualities - hope.

The Stone Diaries is the story of one woman's life; a truly sensuous novel that reflects and illuminates the unsettled decades of our century. Born in 1905, Daisy Goodwill drifts through the chapters of childhood, marriage, widowhood, remarriage, motherhood and old age....

In 1798, Daniel Dickinson, a young Quaker father and widower, leaves his home in Pennsylvania to establish a new life. He sets out with two horses, a wagonful of belongings, his five children, a 15-year-old orphan wife, and a few land warrants for his future homestead. When Daniel suddenly trades a...

Winner of the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and longlisted for the 2017 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, this extraordinary novel tells the story of three...

WINNER OF THE GOVERNOR GENERAL'S LITERARY AWARD FOR FICTION A GLOBE AND MAIL, CBC BOOKS, APPLE BOOKS, AND NOW TORONTO BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR In the tradition of The Poisonwood Bible and State of Wonder, a novel set in the rainforest of Ecuador...

Sixteen-year-old Nomi Nickel longs to hang out with Lou Reed and Marianne Faithfull in New York City's East Village. Instead she's trapped in East Village, Manitoba, a small town whose population is Mennonite: "the most embarrassing sub-sect of people to belong to if you're a teenager." East Village...

The Underpainter is a novel of interwoven lives in which the world of art collides with the realm of human emotion. It is the story of Austin Fraser, an American painter now in his later years, who is haunted by memories of those whose lives most deeply touched his own, including a young...

Bestselling author Guy Vanderhaeghe's new book of fiction is both timely and timeless and showcases his supreme talent as a storyteller and poignant observer of the human condition. Among these nine addictive and resonant stories: A teenage boy breaks out of the strict confines of...

The Englishman's Boy brilliantly links together Hollywood in the 1920s with one of the bloodiest, most brutal events of the nineteenth-century Canadian West - the Cypress Hills Massacre. Vanderhaeghe's rendering of the stark, dramatic beauty of the western landscape and of Hollywood in its...

These superbly crafted stories reveal an astonishing range, with settings that vary from a farm on the Canadian prairies to Bloomsbury in London, from a high-rise apartment to a mine-shaft. Vanderhaeghe has the uncanny ability to show us the world through the eyes of an eleven-year-old boy as...

Winner, 2023 Governor General's Literary Award Winner, 2023 Writers Trust Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2+ Emerging Writers Shortlisted for the 2024 Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize Longlisted for the 2024 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction Genre-blending stories of...

Juliet, Saskatchewan, is a blink-of-an-eye kind of town -- the welcome sign announces a population of 1,011 people -- and it¿s easy to imagine that nothing happens on its hot and dusty streets. Situated on the edge of the Little Snake sand hills, Juliet and its inhabitants are caught in limbo...

“What can that mean, I and my family will have a ‘reserve of one square mile’?” So asks Big Bear of Governor Morris, come to impose a square treaty on the round, buffalo-covered world of the Plains Cree. As the buffalo vanish and the tension builds to the second...

A Discovery of Strangers is a story--based on true events--of love and innocence, murder, greed and passion set within the terrifying, fragile Arctic landscape. In 1820, John Franklin's small group of British officers and Canadian voyageurs, on their first Expedition to search for a route...

The Sacrifice is a haunting depiction of one family and its often tragic attempts to come to terms with a new life in a new country. It is a moving, almost biblical story of a father possessed by his hope for his only son; of a son who rebels against his father’s ideals, yet sacrifices...

Underneath the seemingly ordinary lives of Wright's characters are entire worlds of emotion that, once entered, become wildy unpredictable. Clara Callan has that capacity to surprise, to draw the reader below the smooth surface of convention into a world of passion, where secrets percolate and...