The Governor General's Fiction Winners

A tour de force of inventive wit Shakespeare's Dog is the eccentric and high-spirited story of William Shakespeare and how he came to bed and wed Anne Hathaway. Told from the point of view of the Bard's dog, this astonishing novel of comic bliss, hailed as a triumph of language and an amusing delight.

The Engineer of Human Souls is a labyrinthine comic novel that investigates the journey and plight of novelist Danny Smiricky, a Czech immigrant to Canada. As the novel begins, he is a professor of American literature at a college in Toronto. Out of touch with his young students, and hounded by the Czech secret police, Danny is let loose to roam between past and present, adopting whatever identity that he chooses or has been imposed upon him by History.

One of the most powerful and most widely read novels of our time in display-worthy hardcover: A gripping vision of our society radically overturned by a theocratic revolution—from “the patron saint of feminist dystopian fiction” (The New York Times) The sixth and final season of the award-winning Hulu series starring Elisabeth Moss is streaming soon In Margaret Atwood’s dystopian future, environmental disasters and declining birthrates have led to a Second American Civil War. The result is the rise of the Republic of Gilead, a totalitarian regime that enforces rigid social roles and enslaves the few remaining fertile women. Offred is one of these, a Handmaid bound to produce children for one of Gilead’s commanders. Deprived of her husband, her child, her freedom, and even her own name, Offred clings to her memories and her will to survive. Like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Handmaid''s Tale has endured not only as a literary landmark but as a warning of a possible future that is still chillingly relevant. With an introduction by Valerie Martin. Everyman''s Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Contemporary Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author''s life and times.

A divorced woman returns to her childhood home where she confronts the memory of her parents' confounding yet deep bond. The accidental near-drowning of a child exposes the fragility of the trust between children and parents. A young man, remembering a terrifying childhood incident, wrestles with the responsibility he has always felt for his younger brother. In these and other stories Alice Munro proves once again a sensitive and compassionate chronicler of our times. Drawing us into the most intimate corners of ordinary lives, she reveals much about ourselves, our choices, and our experiences of love.

David Adams Richards’ Governor General’s Award-winning novel is a powerful tale of resignation and struggle, fierce loyalties and compassion. This book is the first in Richards’ acclaimed Miramichi trilogy. Set in a small mill town in northern New Brunswick, it draws us into the lives of a community of people who live there, including: Joe Walsh, isolated and strong in the face of a drinking problem; his wife, Rita, willing to believe the best about people; and their teenage daughter Adele, whose nature is rebellious and wise, and whose love for her father wars with her desire for independence. Richards’ unforgettable characters are linked together in conflict, and in inarticulate love and understanding. Their plight as human beings is one we share.

Des Howell is a former rock 'n' roll star who never leaves his secluded oceanfront mansion. Naked, rich and fabulously deranged, he subsists on a steady diet of whiskey, pharmaceuticals and jelly doughnuts and occasionally works on his masterpiece, "Whale Music." One day, upon awakening from his usual drunken stupor, Des discovers on his sofa a young alien from the faraway universe of Toronto. This girl has made the trek to Des' hideaway because she believes in the "Whale Music" and she's crazy enough to think that Des can make a comeback hit with his mad magnum opus--


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Gustad Noble finds his family life and professional life unravelling during 1971, as Bombay teams with national tensions on the international scene.

With ravishing beauty and unsettling intelligence, Michael Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning novel traces the intersection of four damaged lives in an Italian villa at the end of World War II. Hana, the exhausted nurse; the maimed thief, Caravaggio; the wary sapper, Kip: each is haunted by the riddle of the English patient, the nameless, burned man who lies in an upstairs room and whose memories of passion, betrayal, and rescue illuminate this book like flashes of heat lightning

This is the poignant story of Daisy Goodwill, twentieth-century pilgrim, from her calamitous birth in Canada to her death in a Florida nursing home nearly ninety years later. Struggling to find her place in the world, she listens and observes, becoming a witness to her own life and death in this rich tale that reflects and illuminates our own unsettled era. ~from the back cover

A Discovery of Strangers is a story--based on true events--of love and innocence, murder, greed and passion set within the terrifying, fragile Arctic landscape. In 1820, John Franklin's small group of British officers and Canadian voyageurs, on their first expedition to search for a route through the incomprehensible North, encounter the Yellowknife Indians -- and Greenstockings, fifteen-year-old daughter of Keskarrah, elder of the Yellowknife, meets young Robert Hood, son of a Lancashire clergyman. Wordless, they devise a language of their own as their two worlds clash.

In the title story, an eight-year-old boy's life is transformed when his parents take in an adolescent drifter. She stays in the basement and works at his father's service station, and she is as tough and unreachable as the boy is sensitive and vulnerable. She curses, she lies, she fixes cars, and she eventually steals from the cash register and runs off with the middle-aged alcoholic mechanic. To the boy, though, she is mysterious and beautiful, straddling the grown-up world and his own. Her presence inspires in him a constant longing that he can't articulate but that Hollingshead describes with unaffected sympathy. In other stories, a teenager glimpses, inexplicably, a naked man in his parents' house; a young writer attempts to confront an abusive nurse as he wrestles with his (drug-induced and natural) indecisiveness; a housewife is denounced for giving away a box of mysterious medical supplies intended for the Sudan and tries desperately to get it back. Hollingshead's tales are populated by genuine, sincere people who feel out of step in their worlds, who struggle to maintain order, to connect with their families and peers, whose interactions are startling and comical, moving and pathetic.

The Englishman’s Boybrilliantly links together Hollywood in the 1920s with one of the bloodiest, most brutal events of the nineteenth-century Canadian West – the Cypress Hills Massacre. Vanderhaeghe’s rendering of the stark, dramatic beauty of the western landscape and of Hollywood in its most extravagant era – with its visionaries, celebrities, and dreamers – provides vivid background for scenes of action, adventure, and intrigue. Richly textured, evocative of time and place, this is an unforgettable novel about power, greed, and the pull of dreams that has at its centre the haunting story of a young drifter – “the Englishman’s boy” – whose fate, ultimately, is a tragic one. From the Hardcover edition.

"The detached eye of the narrator never falters, though passion hums beneath the surface like some vast primeval beast beneath the ice. The mixing of paints becomes erotic, and the minute recalling of details is sensual...Characters appear like wraiths from the fog, become dazzling specks on a snowblind eye, encounter dreams and apparitions, while the cold, painted-out hero is laid before us in his desperate vulnerability...A wholly believable and very moving experience." - *Independent*

Satirical essays and stories. The essay, How to Write a Serious Novel about Love, is a spoof on writing schools, while the story, Count Your Blessings, is on a woman depressed by her perfect marriage.

"Elizabeth and After tells the story of Carl McKelvey, who in midlife returns to the small town of West Gull, Ontario, to mend his family's legacy of alcohol and violence, to reconnect with his young daughter, and to reconcile himself with the spirit of his beautiful mother, killed several years earlier in a tragic accident. Carl's only problem is that West Gull won't have him. Hesitant to forgive his family's tragic legacy, the community still remembers his mother's radiant warmth, her popularity, and the suspicious circumstances of her passing. What Carl will soon realize is that the difficult truths of who he was and is will one day be met in full, and it is up to his own heart, and the hearts of those in West Gull, to finally allow him a measure of forgiveness.". "Elizabeth and After wraps us up in the lives of Carl and his family, and the other 683 residents of this snowy Canadian hamlet, as they all struggle to recognize the vagaries of the past and their own power to correct the present."--BOOK JACKET.

With his first novel since the internationally acclaimed The English Patient, Booker Prize--winning author Michael Ondaatje gives us a work displaying all the richness of imagery and language and the piercing emotional truth that we have come to know as the hallmarks of his writing.Anil's Ghost transports us to Sri Lanka, a country steeped in centuries of tradition, now forced into the late twentieth century by the ravages of civil war. Into this maelstrom steps Anil Tissera, a young woman born in Sri Lanka, educated in England and America, who returns to her homeland as a forensic anthropologist sent by an international human rights group to discover the source of the organized campaigns of murder engulfing the island. What follows is a story about love, about family, about identity, about the unknown enemy, about the quest to unlock the hidden past--a story propelled by a riveting mystery. Unfolding against the deeply evocative background of Sri Lanka's landscape and ancient civilization, Anil's Ghost is a literary spellbinder--Michael Ondaatje's most powerful novel yet.

E-book extras: "Hero of the Humdrum": A profile of Richard B. Wright by John Bemrose; prize citations.It is 1934, and in a small town in Canada, Clara Callan reluctantly takes leave of her sister, Nora, who is bound for the show business world of New York. Richard B. Wright's acclaimed novel, winner in 2001 of Canada's two most prestigious literary awards, is a mesmerizing tribute to friendship and sisterhood, romance and redemption.Winner in 2001 of Canada's two most prestigious literary awards -- the Governor General's Award and the Giller Prize -- Richard B. Wright's celebrated novel Clara Callan is the powerful, moving story of two sisters and their life-changing experiences on the eve of World War II.

As Sawai deftly turns over the stones of these people''s lives and reveals the squalor, the fear and the unhappiness that lie beneath, she also uncovers that most precious of human qualities - hope.

"Based on a true story, Elle chronicles the ordeals and adventures of a young French woman marooned on the desolate Isle of Demons during Jacques Cartier's ill-fated third and last attempt to colonize Canada." "The novel brilliantly reinvents the beginning of this country's history: what Canada meant to the early European adventurers, what these Europeans meant to Canada's original inhabitants, and the terrible failure of the two worlds to recognize each other as human. In a carnal whirlwind of myth and story, of death, lust and love, of beauty and hilarity, Glover brings the past violently and unexpectedly into the present. Mysterious, mystical, and thoroughly original, Elle charts the magical zone of delirium where races, genders, languages, and ideas converge - everything the history books leave out."--BOOK JACKET.

"A 16-year-old rebels against the conventions of her strict Mennonite community and tries to come to terms with the collapse of her family ..."--Publishers Weekly.

A Perfect Night to go to China focuses on a man named Roman who has a six year old son. One evening Roman decides to go out for just 15 minutes. However when he returns he finds an empty house and learns that his son has vanished. This story then takes us into Romans life and his struggle to cope with the loss of his son as his whole world continues to fall apart in front of his eyes.

Ireland, 1846. A boy on a life-changing journey which lives in the mind long after the final page. It is 1846, the height of the Great Hunger, and young Fergus is forced to grow up fast. Following the destruction of his home, he loses not only his family but everything he has ever loved. So begins an epic journey from innocence to experience that takes him from the west coast of Ireland to the docks and bordellos of Liverpool, and across the Atlantic. Along his journey he will meet bandit chiefs and railway navvies, ‘pearl boys' and daring girls, and the willful Molly, who will teach him the ways of the world.

In 1970s California, a makeshift family of a father, daughter, adopted daughter and farm hand's lives are shattered by a traumatic event and they are sent off on separate courses.

Winner of the 2008 Governor General’s Award for Fiction Montreal during the turbulent mid-1980s: Chernobyl has set Geiger counters thrumming across the globe, HIV/AIDS is cutting a deadly swath through the gay population worldwide, and locally, tempers are flaring over the recent codification of French as the official language of Quebec. Hiding out in a seedy apartment near campus, Alex Fratarcangeli (“Don’t worry. . . . I can’t even pronounce it myself”), an awkward, thirty-something grad student, is plagued by the sensation that his entire life is a fraud. Scarred by a distant father and a dangerous relationship with his ex Liz, and consumed by a floundering dissertation linking Darwin’s theory of evolution with the history of human narrative, Alex has come to view love and other human emotions as “evolutionary surplus, haphazard neural responses that nature had latched onto for its own insidious purposes.” When Alex receives a letter from Ingrid, the beautiful woman he knew years ago in Sweden, notifying him of the existence of his five-year-old son, he is gripped by a paralytic terror. Whenever Alex’s thoughts grow darkest, he recalls Desmond, the British professor with dubious credentials whom he met years ago in the Galapagos. Treacherous and despicable, wearing his ignominy like his rumpled jacket, Desmond nonetheless caught Alex in his thrall and led him to some life-altering truths during their weeks exploring Darwin’s islands together. It is only now that Alex can begin to comprehend these unlikely life lessons, and see a glimmer of hope shining through what he had thought was meaninglessness.

Based on the real lives of Lady Lucie Duff Gordon and her maid. The story follows Sally as she travels with Lady Duff Gordon from London to Egypt working as a lady's maid. While her mistress seeks treatment for tuberculosis, Sally discovers the wider world and experiences more freedom than ever before, even going so far as to fall in love. Harsh realities intervene, however, causing Sally to come to terms with the limitations of her position as the mistress of nothing.

Hermann Kermit Warm is going to die. The enigmatic and powerful man known only as the Commodore has ordered it, and his henchmen, Eli and Charlie Sisters, will make sure of it. Though Eli doesn't share his brother's appetite for whiskey and killing, he's never known anything else. But their prey isn't an easy mark, and on the road from Oregon City to Warm's gold-mining claim outside Sacramento, Eli begins to question what he does for a living - and whom he does it for. With The Sisters Brothers, Patrick deWitt pays homage to the classic Western, transforming it into an unforgettable comic tour de force. Filled with a remarkable cast of characters - losers, cheaters, and ne'er-do-wells from all stripes of life - and told by a complex and compelling narrator, it is a violent, lustful odyssey through the underworld of the 1850s frontier that beautifully captures the humor, melancholy, and grit of the Old West, and two brothers bound by blood, violence, and love.

Shunned by his Quaker community for marrying a servant girl, Daniel Dickinson pursues a new life on the Virginia frontier, where his family's values are tested by the challenges of homestead life and the moral dilemma of slave ownership.