The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

Longlisted for the 2019 Giller Prize
Winner of the 2019 Booker Prize
Published by McClelland & Stewart

More than fifteen years after the events of The Handmaid’s Tale, the theocratic regime of the Republic of Gilead maintains its grip on power, but there are signs it is beginning to rot from within. At this crucial moment, the lives of three radically different women converge, with potentially explosive results.

Two have grown up as part of the first generation to come of age in the new order. The testimonies of these two young women are joined by a third voice: a woman who wields power through the ruthless accumulation and deployment of secrets.

As Atwood unfolds The Testaments, she opens up the innermost workings of Gilead as each woman is forced to come to terms with who she is, and how far she will go for what she believes.

A Minor Chorus by Billy-Ray Belcourt

Longlisted for the 2023 Giller Prize
Published by Hamish Hamilton

An unnamed narrator abandons his unfinished thesis and returns to northern Alberta in search of what eludes him: the shape of the novel he yearns to write, an autobiography of his rural hometown, the answers to existential questions about family, love, and happiness.

What ensues is a series of conversations, connections, and disconnections that reveals the texture of life in a town literature has left unexplored, where the friction between possibility and constraint provides an insistent background score.

Whether he’s meeting with an auntie distraught over the imprisonment of her grandson, engaging in rez gossip with his cousin at a pow wow, or lingering in bed with a married man after a hotel room hookup, the narrator makes space for those in his orbit to divulge their private joys and miseries, testing the theory that storytelling can make us feel less lonely.

Dominoes at the Crossroads by Kaie Kellough

Longlisted for the 2020 Giller Prize
Published by Véhicule Press
In this collection of stories, Kaie Kellough’s characters navigate race, history, and coming-of-age by way of their confessions and dreams. Through the eyes of jazz musicians, hitchhikers, quiet suburbanites, student radicals, secret agents, historians, and their fugitive slave ancestors, Kellough guides us from the cobblestones of Montreal’s Old Port to the foliage of a South American rainforest, from a basement in wartime Paris to an underground antique shop in Montréal during the October Crisis, allowing the force of imagination to tip the balance of time like a line of dominoes.

Held by Anne Michaels

Winner of the 2024 Giller Prize
Shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize
Published by McClelland & Stewart

1917. On a battlefield near the River Aisne, John lies in the aftermath of a blast, unable to move or feel his legs. Struggling to focus his thoughts, he is lost to memory—a chance encounter in a pub by a railway, a hot bath with his lover on a winter night, his childhood on a faraway coast—as the snow falls.

1920. John has returned from war to North Yorkshire, near another river—alive, but not whole. Reunited with Helena, an artist, he reopens his photography business and endeavours to keep on living. But the past erupts insistently into the present, as ghosts begin to surface in his pictures: ghosts whose messages he cannot understand.

So begins a narrative that spans four generations, moments of connection and consequence igniting and re-igniting as the century unfolds. In luminous moments of desire, comprehension, longing, and transcendence, the sparks fly upward, working their transformations decades later. This resonance through time—not only of actions but also of feelings and perceptions—desire in its many forms—are at the heart of this novel’s profound investigation.

Anil’s Ghost by Michael Ondaatje

Winner of the 2020 Giller Prize
Published by Vintage Canada

Steeped in centuries of cultural achievement and tradition, Sri Lanka has been ravaged in the late twentieth century by bloody civil war. Anil Tissera, born in Sri Lanka but educated in England and the U.S., is sent by an international human rights group to participate in an investigation into suspected mass political murders in her homeland. Working with an archaeologist, she discovers a skeleton whose identity takes Anil on a fascinating journey that involves a riveting mystery. What follows, in a novel rich with character, emotion, and incident, is a story about love and loss, about family, identity and the unknown enemy. And it is a quest to unlock the hidden past—like a handful of soil analyzed by an archaeologist, the story becomes more diffuse the farther we reach into history.

A universal tale of the casualties of war, unfolding as a detective story, the book gradually gives way to a more intricate exploration of its characters, a symphony of loss and loneliness haunted by a cast of solitary strangers and ghosts. The atrocities of a seemingly futile, muddled war are juxtaposed against the ancient, complex and ultimately redemptive culture and landscape of Sri Lanka.

To Place a Rabbit by Madhur Anand

Published by Knopf Canada

This delightfully clever, artfully layered novel begins when the author of a popular science book attends a literary festival, where she strikes up a friendship with a charismatic novelist. This novelist’s recent book is an experiment: a novella that was written in English but published only in French translation—a language the novelist herself cannot read or understand. Moreover, the novelist has lost her original manuscript of the work. The scientist, who is fluent in French, impulsively offers to re-translate the novella back into English for the novelist. But as she embarks on this task, she is haunted by memories, theories and queries—especially about a long-ago passionate affair with a French lover—that insert themselves into the translation process, troubling it, then fraying it, and finally pulling it apart at the seams. As the scientist desperately tries to complete her task before losing control of her well-organized life, both the novelist and the long-ago French lover pop up in the present day, further complicating both life and art.

We Could Be Rats by Emily Austin

Published by Simon & Schuster Canada

Sigrid hates working at the Dollar Pal but having always resisted the idea of growing up into the trappings of adulthood, she did not graduate high school, preferring to roam the streets of her small town with her best friend Greta, the only person in the world who ever understood her. Her older sister Margit is baffled and frustrated by Sigrid’s inability to conform to the expectations of polite society.

But Sigrid’s detachment veils a deeper turmoil and sensitivity. She’s haunted by the pains of her past—from pretending her parents were swamp monsters when they shook the floorboards with their violent arguments to grappling with losing Greta’s friendship to the opioid epidemic ravaging their town. As Margit sets out to understand Sigrid and the secrets she has hidden, both sisters, in their own time and way, discover that reigniting their shared childhood imagination is the only way forward.

What unfolds is an unforgettable story of two sisters finding their way back to each other, and a celebration of that transcendent, unshakable bond.

Born by Heather Birrell

Published by Coach House Books

High school English teacher Elise loves teaching Shakespeare. She is also very pregnant. She’s trapped in a classroom with her Grade 12 students during a lockdown. Anthony, the cause of the lockdown, is roaming the halls with a knife in search of some solace, consumed by thoughts of his best friend Samantha, who is in peril. Maria, the school’s counselor, is second-guessing her decision to turn him in.

As the lockdown drags on, Elise can no longer deny that she’s going into labour. And she’ll have to rely on the students to get her through: Shai-Anna and Faduma end up acting as midwives, and the others do what they can.

In the same way the self shatters and sharpens when one is doing the hard work of giving birth, so does the narrative of the novel, with various people in the school picking up the threads of the story.

We, the Kindling by Otoniya J. Okot Bitek

Published by Alchemy by Knopf Canada

As this spare and luminous novel begins, we meet Miriam, Helen and Maggie—three friends who, years ago when they were school children, survived capture by the Lord’s Resistance Army in northern Uganda. Now, as the women go about their new lives in the city, shopping, caring for their children, planning and thinking about what the future might hold, we come to understand how deeply their past haunts the present.

In graceful yet unflinching prose, Otoniya Okot Bitek weaves vivid folk tales with taut realism, revealing flashes of life before the war that ravaged Uganda, unspooling the terrible events that led to abductions of children from supposedly safe schools, and tracing perilous journeys home again. Facing endless treks across the ravaged countryside and through narrow mountain passes, gun battles and constant brutality, many girls did not survive. Those who did make it back home, some carrying small children of their own, bore the unspoken weight of their experiences within families and communities that often wished to forget and move on.

As Good a Place as Any by Rebecca Păpucaru

Published by Guernica Editions

A teenaged refugee chases stardom but finds her purpose in Canada’s abortion-rights movement. Fleeing Chile after the 1973 coup, sixteen-year-old Paulina and her older brother Ernesto settle in Toronto. While Ernesto dreams of a glorious homecoming, Paulina embraces her liberation from the conventional life expected of her back home. Yet despite landing her first big role on a popular children’s cartoon, and her first girlfriend, she cannot escape survivor’s guilt. Haunted by the death of a childhood friend, she joins the underground struggle for reproductive freedom. But when a fellow exile pleads for her help terminating a pregnancy, Paulina’s public and private selves threaten to collide.