Governor General's Literary Awards, Fiction - Winners

The Governor General’s Literary Awards celebrate literature and inspire people to read books by creators from Canada.

Updated April 30, 2024
Drag items up and down to your preferred order then select the "Save Order" button.
The handmaid's tale
Atwood, Margaret
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * An instant classic and eerily prescient cultural phenomenon, from "the patron saint of feminist dystopian fiction" (The New York Times). Now an award-winning Hulu series starring Elizabeth Moss. Look for The Testaments, the...
The luminaries : a novel
Catton, Eleanor
The bestselling, Man Booker Prize-winning novel hailed as "a true achievement. Catton has built a lively parody of a 19th-century novel, and in so doing created a novel for the 21st, something utterly new. The pages fly."-New York Times Book Review It is 1866, and Walter Moody has...
The Sisters brothers
deWitt, Patrick
SOON TO BE A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING JAKE GYLLENHAAL, RIZ AHMED, JOHN C. REILLY, AND JOAQUIN PHOENIX A BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST AND A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: Publishers Weekly * Amazon * Hudson Booksellers * Washington Post Hermann Kermit Warm is going to die. The...
Five little Indians
Good, Michelle
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...
Pure colour
Heti, Sheila
Winner of the 2022 Governor General's Literary Award in Fiction Shortlisted for the 2023 Rathbones Folio Prize in Fiction Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vulture, The Times Literary Supplement, and more
Such a long journey : a novel
Mistry, Rohinton
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...
Anil's ghost
Ondaatje, Michael
With his first novel since the internationally acclaimedThe English Patient, Michael Ondaatje gives us a work displaying all the richness of imagery and language and the piercing emotional truth that we have come to know as the hallmarks of his writing. The time is our own time. The place is Sri...
Divisadero
Ondaatje, Michael
The eagerly awaited novel by the internationally acclaimed author of The English Patient offers a psychologically intricate, devastating, and beautiful story of how a traumatic event shatters a makeshift family and sets each on a separate course.
The English patient : a novel
Ondaatje, Michael
BOOKER PRIZE WINNER * NATIONAL BESTSELLER * The bestselling author of Warlight traces the intersection of four damaged lives in an abandoned Italian villa at the end of World War II. "A rare spellbinding web of dreams." --Time   The nurse Hana, exhausted by...
The mistress of nothing
Pullinger, Kate.
Winner of Canada's prestigious Governor General's Award, this richly rendered American debut captures the life of a lady's maid on her journey from the confines of Victorian England to the uncharted reaches of Egypt's Nile Valley.
The lives of the saints
Ricci, Nino.
Bhima has been a domestic servant in an upper-middle-class Bombay household for more than twenty years, washing dishes she is not allowed to eat from, cleaning furniture she is not allowed to sit on. But Bhima has also forged a special bond with her mistress, Sera, their relationship strengthened...
The stone diaries
Shields, Carol.
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. Bewildered by her inability...
The purchase
Spalding, Linda.
Winner of Canada's 2012 Governor General's Award for Fiction  In this provocative and starkly beautiful historical novel, a Quaker family moves from Pennsylvania to the Virginia frontier, where slaves are the only available workers and where the family's values and beliefs are...
Do not say we have nothing : a novel
Thien, Madeleine
"In a single year, my father left us twice. The first time, to end his marriage, and the second, when he took his own life. I was ten years old." Master storyteller Madeleine Thien takes us inside an extended family in China, showing us the lives of two successive generations--those who...
A complicated kindness : a novel
Toews, Miriam
This "darkly funny and provocative" coming-of-age novel balances grief and hope in the voice of a witty teenage girl whose Canadian family is shattered by fundamentalist Christianity (O, The Oprah Magazine). From the author of Women Talking--now an Academy Award...

Library staff! You can create and contribute to lists. Contact your catalog administrator or log in here.