I love Canadian Literature. It is my favourite genre of fiction and I love love love following the Giller and Canada Reads every year. I always try to read all of the shortlists and some of the long lists and so for the past month or two I've been working on getting the five chosen books read so I'm ready for the big announcement and so I can try to make a prediction on the winner. Except that I can't decide what the front runner is!
These five books are all very different. Four novels and one collection of short stories. All incredible reads.
The Listeners
This book was WILD! First of all it was so relatable, it was so easy to see how all of this events could grow into the results of what happened, a statement on human behaviour and how we act when we are in groups etc. It is also written as though it is a retelling of the events from a person who experienced them first hand, which I thought was a really cool way to read it back, like it was a memoir ish book but it actually wasn't. I really enjoyed reading this one and it kept me thinking about it long after I was finished.
Glorious Frazzled Beings
This collection of short stories was really just as the title describes, glorious and frazzled. Last year the collection of short stories How to Pronounce Knife was my favourite of the shortlist, this year I can't quite say the same. This one if my personal least favourite out of the five but honestly, the five are all so good that someone needed to be in the fifth spot. I really really liked some of the stories, and I found others to be sort of confusing or unsure of the point of them.
Fight Night
Miriam Toews is a Canadian Literature superstar. One of my favourite books is A Complicated Kindness (winner of Canada Reads 2006) so I'm always thrilled to pick up another of her novels. I was very excited to read Fight Night and again, I loved it. It's told from the perspective of Swiv, a 9 year old girl who has been suspended for fighting at school and is in the care of her aging and hilarious grandmother while her pregnant mom works each day. It's over the top, very child like, and the statements on mental health are some of the best I've read.
What Strange Paradise
As I stated on instagram, whoa this book pulled the rug right out from under me. How dare it end the way it did!
Okay in all seriousness though, this book was incredibly written. The back and forth from "before" and "after" was really well done. The children characters were so lovable. It was a heart wrenching topic but at once point it made me laugh out loud. I'll absolutely be reading the authors other novel, this one was an absolute feat of literature.
Son of the House
Huge congrats to Cheluchi who just won The Nigeria Prize for Literature for this novel!
Right at the beginning of the novel Nwabulu and Julie are kidnapped together in 2011 Nigeria and forced to share space for a long time, during that time decide to tell each other their life stories. The novel then moved to tell us the back story of each woman, from Nwabulu’s childhood and teen years as a house girl trying to escape her home to the privileged Julie who finally marries but finds she cannot have children. The story comes together at the end to their present day and gives us a story of the resilience of women.
Five incredible books all go head to head on November 8th and only one can win. I honestly have no idea which one it will be. Last year I predicted the winner correctly and this year I will have to wait and see because the jury had completely out done themselves in terms of the shortlist. Wow. I just cannot wait to see who takes home the prize!
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