Sunday, November 8, 2009

The Giller is coming


Confession: I have not yet read any of the books nominated for this year's Scotiabank Giller Award (the winner of which will be announced tomorrow), but I have been following the coverage pretty closely.

Three of the finalists were on my to-read radar before the long-list was released in September. Add to that Margaret Atwood's The Year of the Flood (which is still getting discussed despite its absence from the short-list) and I will have a busy few months ahead of me spent reading new Canadian novels.

This year's finalists are: Kim Echlin's The Disappeared, Annabel Lyon's The Golden Mean, Linden MacIntyre's The Bishop's Man, Colin McAdam's Fall and Anne Michaels' The Winter Vault.

Because I haven't read the short-list, I'm wary of trying to predict a winner. But, I have been right for the last two years (hoping for Joseph Boyden's Through Black Spruce last year and Elizabeth Hay's Late Nights on Air the year before), basing my prediction on nothing besides which novel I want to read most.

I am torn between Annabel Lyon's The Golden Mean and Anne Michaels' The Winter Vault. Why? Well, they are both novels about topics I'm not all that familiar with and that intrigues me. I also read really interesting reviews of both books when they first came out.

Both the CBC and the Giller websites have good blurbs for the five finalists, and the Globe and Mail ran a good discussion about where they think the novels will fall when the award is handed out tomorrow night and their recordings of each author reading from their nominated novel are also great.

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