The Canada
Council for the Arts today announced the 2015 shortlist for the Governor
General’s Literary Awards. From http://www.amazon.ca, here are
brief descriptions of the five finalists for fiction:
How You Were Born by Kate Cayley
How You Were Born is a collection of short stories looking at
the bizarre, the tragi-comic and the unbelievable elements that run through our
lives. An aging academic becomes
convinced that he is haunted by his double. Two children believe their neighbours are war
criminals in hiding. A dwarf in a circus
dreams of a perfect wedding. An
eleven-year-old girl becomes obsessed with the acrobat who visits her small
town. Two women fall in love over a
painting of the apocalypse. A group of
siblings put their senile Holocaust survivor father into institutional care,
while failing to notice that he is reliving the past. Each story examines, from a different angle,
the difficult business of love, loyalty and memory.
Outline by Rachel Cusk
Outline is a novel in ten conversations. It follows a novelist teaching a course in
creative writing during an oppressively hot summer in Athens. She leads her students in storytelling
exercises. She meets other visiting
writers for dinner. She goes swimming
with an elderly Greek bachelor. The
people she encounters speak, volubly, about themselves: their fantasies,
anxieties, pet theories, regrets and longings.
And through these disclosures, a portrait of the narrator is drawn by
contrast, a portrait of a woman learning to face a great loss.
Note: This book also appears on the Scotiabank
Giller Prize shortlist and was a finalist for the Baileys Women’s Prize for
Fiction.
The Evening Chorus by Helen Humphreys
Resigned to
living out the Second World War in a German POW camp, James Hunter, an English
officer, begins studying a pair of redstarts near the camp. His interest in the birds captures the
attention of the Kommandant and gives James cause to fear for his life. Meanwhile, back in England, James's young
wife, Rose, falls headlong into a passionate affair with another man. When James's sister, Enid, is bombed out of
her London flat, she comes to stay with Rose, and the two women form a
surprising friendship that alters the course of both of their lives.
The Winter Family by Clifford Jackson
The novel
traces a gang of ruthless outlaws from its birth during the American Civil War
to a final bloody showdown in the Territory of Oklahoma. From the 1860s to the 1880s, the outlaws
known as the Winter Family roam the harsh frontier, both serving and battling
the fierce advance of civilization. Among its twisted specimens are the
psychopathic killer Quentin Ross, the mean and moronic Empire brothers, the
impassive ex-slave Fred Johnson, and the gunslinging child prodigy, Lukas
Riddle. At the centre of this ultraviolent storm is their cold, dandified and
golden-eyed leader, Augustus Winter--a man with a pathological resistance to the
rules of society and a preternatural gift for butchery.
Note: This novel was on the Scotiabank Giller Prize
longlist.
Daddy Lenin and Other Stories by Guy Vanderhaeghe
Among these
nine stories: A teenage boy breaks out of the strict confines of his family, but
his bid for independence leads him in over his head. An
actor’s penchant for hiding behind a role, on and off stage, is tested to the
limits and what he comes to discover finally places him face to face with the
truth. With his mother hospitalized for a nervous condition and his father away
on long work stints, a boy is sent to another family for his meals. His
gradually building relationship with a teenage daughter who has been left
handicapped from polio opens unexpected doors to the world. In the title story, a middle-aged man re-meets
his former adviser at university, a charismatic and domineering professor
dubbed Daddy Lenin. As their tense
reunion progresses, secrets from the past painfully revise remembered events
and threaten to topple the scaffolding of a marriage.
Note: I highlighted the three novels of Vanderhaege’s
frontier series in yesterday’s blog entry.
See http://ggbooks.ca/~/media/ggbooks/2015/documents/gg%20finalists-e.pdf?mw=1382
for the finalists in all the categories.
The winners will be announced on Oct. 28.
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