The longlist for the 2013 of the Scotiabank Giller Prize is:
- Dennis Bock for his novel Going Home AgainA wrenching and dramatic story that explores the fabric of family: sibling rivalries, marriages on the rocks, hurt children, midlife crises--in short, modern life When Charlie Bellerose reunites with his flamboyant brother Nate, after two decades apart, their youthful rivalry seems forgotten. Drawn together again by their failed marriages, trying to survive in a world of long-distance parenting and hopeful reunions, they begin to imagine that they can be a new family of sorts. But Charlie's chance encounter with his first love, Holly, now happily married, unravels his past and complicates his present, plunging him back to his bittersweet college days in Montreal and the fate of his best friend Miles, and forward into Nate's dangerous attraction to Holly's sixteen-year-old daughter, Riley. Yet even Charlie, with all he now knows about his brother, cannot foresee the violence to come. A novel about the mysteries of the human heart, Going Home Again is rich with the exquisite tensions between men and women as they fall in and out of love.
- A visceral portrait of life at a crossroads, the Orenda opens with a brutal massacre and the kidnapping of the young Iroquois Snow Falls, a spirited girl with a special gift. Her captor, Bird, is an elder and one of the Huron Nation's great warriors and statesmen. It has been years since the murder of his family, and yet they are never far from his mind. In Snow Falls, Bird recognizes the ghost of his lost daughter and sees that the girl possesses powerful magic that will be useful to him on the troubled road ahead.
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With astonishing range and depth, Scotiabank Giller Prize finalist Lynn Coady gives us eight unforgettable new stories, each one of them grabbing our attention from the first line and resonating long after the last. A young nun charged with talking an anorexic out of her religious fanaticism toys with the thin distance between practicality and blasphemy. A strange bond between a teacher and a schoolgirl takes on ever deeper, and stranger, shapes as the years progress. A bride-to-be with a penchant for nocturnal bondage can't seem to stop bashing herself up in the light of day. Equally adept at capturing the foibles and obsessions of men and of women, compassionate in her humour yet never missing an opportunity to make her characters squirm, fascinated as much by faithlessness as by faith, Lynn Coady is quite possibly the writer who best captures what it is to be human at this particular moment in our history.
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Owen and Duncan are childhood friends who've grown up in picturesque Niagara Falls--known to them by the grittier name Cataract City. As the two know well, there's more to the bordertown than meets the eye: behind the gaudy storefronts and sidewalk vendors, past the hawkers of tourist T-shirts and cheap souvenirs live the real people who scrape together a living by toiling at the Bisk, the local cookie factory. And then there are the truly desperate, those who find themselves drawn to the borderline and a world of dog-racing, bare-knuckle fighting, and night-time smuggling. Owen and Duncan think they are different: both dream of escape, a longing made more urgent by a near-death incident in childhood that sealed their bond. But in adulthood their paths diverge, and as Duncan, the less privileged, falls deep into the town's underworld, he and Owen become reluctant adversaries at opposite ends of the law. At stake is not only survival and escape, but a lifelong friendship that can only be broken at an unthinkable price.
Elisabeth De Mariaffi for her short story collection How To Get Along With Women
David Gilmour for his novel Extraordinary-
How far would a son go to belong? And how far would a father go to protect him? With his curly black hair and his wicked grin, everyone swoons and thinks of Frank Sinatra when Navy musician Jackson Lewis takes the stage. It's World War II, and while stationed in St. John's, Newfoundland, Jack meets the well-heeled, romantic Vivian Clift, a local girl who has never stepped off the Rock and is desperate to see the world. They marry against Vivian's family's wishes--hard to say what it is, but there's something about Jack that they just don't like--and as the war draws to a close, the new couple travels to Windsor to meet Jack's family. But when Vivian meets Jack's mother and brother, everything she thought she knew about her new husband gets called into question. They don't live in the dream home that Jack depicted, they all look different from one another--and different from anyone Vivian has ever seen--and after weeks of waiting to meet Jack's father, William Henry, he never materializes. Steeped in jazz and big-band music, spanning pre- and post-war Windsor-Detroit, St. John's, Newfoundland, and 1950s Toronto, this is an arresting, heartwrenching novel about fathers and sons, love and sacrifice, race relations and a time in our history when the world was on the cusp of momentous change.
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October 1970. Two kidnappings. One dead. A crisis unlike anything the country had ever seen -- here is the story behind history . . . Thirty years after the October Crisis, Sam Nihilo, a freelance writer whose career is in a slump, is drawn to the conspiracy theories that have proliferated in the wake of the events. While investigating the death of one of the FLQ hostages, Nihilo sees his life consumed by an inquiry that leads him further into a flurry of facts, both known and newly discovered. Soon, secret agents, corrupt police officers, politicians, and former terrorists of the Front de Libération du Québec form a mysterious constellation around him, and at the centre lies a complicated and dangerous truth. In the tradition of Don DeLillo's Libra, October 1970 is a thrilling fictional account of the events that shaped one of the most volatile moments in recent history.
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Here comes little Percy Joyce, born in St. Johns in the 50s, an outsider afflicted from birth with a congenital disfigurement but a regular boy on the cusp of teenagehood, fillled with yearning, wild with hormones, longing for what he cant have, for wanting to be let in...and let out; and his disturbingly alluring mother, Penelope, whose sex appeal fairly leaps off the page. Every man in St. Johns lusts after her, inlcuding her sister-in-law Medina, her paying border, Pops MacDougall, with whom she carries on an affair of convenience--and Percy. They live in the Mount, home of the citys Catholic schools and most of its clerics, including the Archbishop of Newfoundland and the villainous Brother McHugh who will go to any lengths to bring Penelope and her unbaptized boy into the bosom of the Church. But there are darker secrets: Penelope and Medinas love is an illegal relationship in that time: if caught, they will be sent to the mental hospital, and Percy will be left alone. Will they be found out? Will Percy sleep with Penelope? Will Percy be lured into the Church? This rich, generous novel reminds us that we all long to be let in, to be loved, and that we cant always have, but sometimes do get, what we want.
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Nora Eldridge, a 37-year-old elementary school teacher in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is on the verge of disappearing. Having abandoned her desire to be an artist, she has become the "woman upstairs," a reliable friend and tidy neighbour always on the fringe of others' achievements. Then into her classroom walks a new pupil, Reza Shahid, a child who enchants as if from a fairy tale. He and his parents--dashing Skandar, a half-Muslim Professor of Ethical History born in Beirut, and Sirena, an effortlessly glamorous Italian artist--have come to America for Skandar to teach at Harvard. But one afternoon, Reza is attacked by schoolyard bullies who punch, push and call him a "terrorist," and Nora is quickly drawn deep into the complex world of the Shahid family. Soon she finds herself falling in love with them, separately and together. Nora's happiness explodes her boundaries--until Sirena's own ambition leads to a shattering betrayal. Written with intimacy and piercing emotion, this urgently dispatched story of obsession and artistic fulfillment explores the thrill--and the devastating cost--of giving in to one's passions. The Woman Upstairs is a masterly story of America today, of being a woman and of the exhilarations of love.
"In the creation of David Slaney, Lisa Moore brings us an unforgettable character, embodying the exuberance and energy of misspent youth. Caught is a propulsive and harrowing read." - Patrick deWitt, author of The Sisters Brothers Internationally acclaimed author Lisa Moore offers us a remarkable new novel about a man who escapes from prison to embark upon one of the most ambitious pot-smuggling adventures ever attempted. Here are bravado and betrayal, bad weather and seas, love, undercover agents, the collusion of governments, unbridled ambition, innocence and the loss thereof, and many, many bales of marijuana. Here, too, is the seeming invincibility of youth and all the folly that it allows. Caught is an exuberant, relentlessly suspenseful, and utterly unique novel, and promises to be the astonishing Lisa Moore's most accomplished work to date.-
From the writer praised as a cross between Hitchcock and Dostoyevsky, a dark and suspenseful novel set in post-war Vienna among the spectators in a criminal trial Mid-summer, 1948. Two strangers, Anna Beer and young Robert Seidel, meet on a train as they return to Vienna, where life is just resuming after the upheavals of war. Men who were conscripted into the German army are filtering back home, including Anna's estranged husband, Dr. Anton Beer, who was held prisoner in a brutal Russian camp. But when Anna returns to their old apartment, she finds another man living there and her husband missing. At his own house, Robert is greeted by a young maid with a deformed spine. The household is in disarray, with his mother addicted to narcotics and his stepfather, an industrialist and former Party member, hospitalized after a mysterious attack. Determined to rebuild their lives, Anna and Robert each begin a dogged search for answers in a world where repression is the order of the day. Before long, they are reunited as spectators at a criminal trial set to deliver judgment on Austria's Nazi crimes. In The Crooked Maid, Dan Vyleta conjures up a city haunted by its sins and a people caught between the needs of the present and debts owed to the past.
- Recently single and listless at work, Henry Hayward spends his days in the solace of alcohol and his nights with a series of interchangeable partners. In a quest to recover, Henry applies for a citizen's observatory post in Afghanistan. Embedded in the regiment with his friends and fellow Newfoundlanders, a routine patrol suddenly turns fatal. And Henry, who survives, knows in his heart that he is responsible. Upon his return to Newfoundland, tormented by guilt, Henry attempts to make posthumous amends by buying and repairing his dead friend's summer home. But matters are complicated by the grief of Martha, his friend's long-term girlfriend, with whom Henry once had an affair. Martha has a revelation of her own, which may change everything.
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