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
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Life before man
Atwood, Margaret
A particularly complicated love triangle sets this poetic novel in motion--from the bestselling author of The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments Elizabeth and Nate, though habitually unfaithful to each other, have remained married for more than a decade....
The handmaid's tale
Atwood, Margaret Eleanor
#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 law of dreams : a novel
Behrens, Peter
The Law of Dreams tells the story of a young man's epic passage from innocence to experience during The Great Famine in Ireland of 1847. On his odyssey through Ireland and Britain, and across the Atlantic to the Boston states, Fergus is initiated to violence, sexual heat, and the glories and dangers...
The luminaries
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...
Elizabeth and After: Penguin Modern Classics Edition
Cohen, Matt
A Touching and Resonant Story of a Man Who returns to the small town of West Gull, Ontario, to mend his family's legacy of alcohol and violence, to reconnect with his young daughter, and to reconcile himself with the spirit of his beautiful mother, killed several years earlier in a tragic accident....
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...
Bear
Engel, Marian.
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
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
Two solitudes
MacLennan, Hugh
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,...
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...
Penguin Modern Classics Dance of the Happy Shades
Munro, Alice
WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE®nbsp;IN LITERATURE 2013 In these fifteen short stories--her eighth collection of short stories in a long and distinguished career--Alice Munro conjures ordinary lives with an extraordinary vision, displaying the remarkable talent for which she is now...
The progress of love : stories
Munro, Alice
WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE® IN LITERATURE 2013 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...
Who do you think you are?
Munro, Alice
WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE® IN LITERATURE 2013 In this series of interweaving stories, Munro recreates the evolving bond between two women in the course of almost forty years. One is Flo, practical, suspicious of other people's airs, at times dismayingly vulgar. the other is...
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
At the end of World War II, the lives of four people--a young American nurse, her dying English patient, a handless American thief, and an Indian soldier in the British army--intertwine in a deserted Italian villa.
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.
Lives of the saints
Ricci, Nino
St. Urbain's horseman
Richler, Mordecai
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
A landmark literary novel, balancing unbearable sadness and beauty in the voice of a witty, beleaguered teen-ager whose family is destroyed by fundamentalist Christianity
The Underpainter
Urquhart, Jane
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...
The Englishman's boy
Vanderhaeghe, Guy
The life of Harry Vincent, a young title-writer in 1920s Hollywood, collides with the story of a young drifter known as the Englishman's boy, who in 1873 joins a group of wolf hunters in the search for a ring of horse thieves, as Harry prepares to work on a movie being made about him some fifty yea
Cool water
Warren, Dianne
With writing reminiscent of Alice Munro, Carol Shields, Larry McMurtry, and Elizabeth Strout, Juliet in August uncovers the incredible drama beneath the inhabitants of a sleepy prairie town. Juliet, Saskatchewan, is a blink-and-you-miss-it kind of town--a dusty oasis on the edge of the...
Clara Callan : a novel
Wright, Richard B.
Winner in 2001 of Canada's two most prestigious literary awards -- the Governor General's Award and the Giller Prize -- Richard B. Wright's celebrated novel Clara Callan is the powerful, moving story of two sisters and their life-changing experiences on the eve of World War II. It is the...

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