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 sensuality,...

#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...

Telling the story of a young mans epic passage from innocence to experience during The Great Famine in Ireland of 1847, this novel is gorgeously written in incandescent language that unleashes the sexual and psychological energies of a lost world.

Winner of the Man Booker Prize 2013 - The astonishing and epic second novel from the prize-winning author of The Rehearsal.

Carl McKelvey returns to small-town Ontario, to a landscape marred by 'progress' and dotted by monster homes, to see more of his young daughter Lizzie, and to put behind him the legacy of violence and alcohol that brought about his divorce and subsequent departure. But he soon discovers he is being...

In which David Staunton continues his psychoanalysis in Zurich and falls in love with his analyst, Doctor Helena Von Haller.

From the author of the acclaimed Ablutions, this dazzlingly original second novel is a darkly funny, offbeat western about a reluctant assassin and his murderous brother.

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...

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...

Imagine a 16th-century society belle turned Robinson Crusoe, a female Don Quixote with an Inuit Sancho Panza, and you'll have an inkling of what's in store in Douglas Glover's outrageously Rabelaisian new novel — his first in ten years. Elle is a lusty, subversive riff on the discovery of the...

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...

"Sarah Henstra's The Red Word will get you fuming, laughing, cheering, and most of all, thinking."--Cosmopolitan A smart, dark, and take-no-prisoners look at rape culture and the extremes to which ideology can go, The Red Word is a campus novel like no other. As...

"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...

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 2014 Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction! This is Thomas King's first literary novel in 15 years and follows on the success of the award-winning and bestselling The Inconvenient Indian and his beloved Green Grass, Running Water and Truth and Bright Water, both...

The culmination and completion of Margaret Laurence’s celebrated Manawaka cycle,The Divinersis an epic novel. This is the powerful story of an independent woman who refuses to abandon her search for love. For Morag Gunn, growing up in a small Canadian prairie town is a toughening process...

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 –...

First time in the New Canadian Library "Northwest of Montreal, through a valley always in sight of the low mountains of the Laurentian Shield, the Ottawa River flows out of Protestant Ontario into Catholic Quebec. It comes down broad and ale-coloured and joins the Saint Lawrence,...

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...

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...

Alice Munro, who received the National Book Critics Circle Award for her latest collection of stories, The Love of a Good Woman, is widely acknowledged as a modern master of the short story. In this earlier collection, she demonstrates all of those strengths that have won her so many literary...

Who Do You Think You Are? . "All ten of the stories in the book follow the career of Rose, whom we first meet as a child growing up in the small town of Hanratty. Rose is a clever, shyly ambitious girl who is fascinated yet appalled by the rude energy of the people around her. After surviving the...

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...

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.

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...

Lady Duff Gordon is the toast of Victorian London society. But when her debilitating tuberculosis means exile, she and her devoted lady's maid, Sally, set sail for Egypt. It is Sally who describes, with a mixture of wonder and trepidation, the odd menage (marshalled by the resourceful Omar) that...

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...

Set in Montreal in the 1980s, The Origin of Species tells the story of 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 disgrace. His alter...

The eighteen stories in Gabrielle Roy’s Street of Riches centre upon the bittersweet experiences of a young girl growing up in the francophone community of St. Boniface, Manitoba. In the persona of her narrator Christine, Roy transfigures the incidents and characters of her own...

The Tin Flute, Gabrielle Roy's first novel, is a classic of Canadian fiction. Imbued with Roy's unique brand of compassion and compelling understanding, this moving story focuses on a family in the Saint-Henri slums of Montreal, its struggles to overcome poverty and ignorance, and its search for...

2002 Governor General's Literary Award Winner for Fiction In her stunning debut collection of short stories, Gloria Sawai examines the heartbreaking lives of people on the margins. A group of young school students prepares a memorial for the town's deceased doctor, at the...

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...

In Canada in 1991, ten-year-old Marie and her mother invite a guest into their home: a young woman who has fled China in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square protests. Her name is Ai-Ming.As her relationship with Marie deepens, Ai-Ming tells the story of her family in revolutionary China, from the...

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...

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...

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...

In a small town in Canada, Clara Callan reluctantly takes leave of her sister, Nora, who is bound for New York. It's a time when the growing threat of fascism in Europe is a constant worry, and people escape from reality through radio and the movies. Meanwhile, the two sisters -- vastly different in...