Canada Reads contenders

Here are the 2010 contenders announced today for the CBC’s “Canada Reads” (with links to their location in the library, in case you’d like to borrow them):

• Fall on Your Knees, by Ann-Marie Macdonald, will be defended by hurdler Perdita Felicien.

• Generation X, by Douglas Coupland, will be defended by rapper Cadence Weapon.

• Good to a Fault, by Marina Endicott, will be defended by broadcaster Simi Sara.

• The Jade Peony, by Wayson Choy, will be defended by Dr. Samantha Nutt, founder of War Child Canada.

• Nikolski, by Nicolas Dickner, will be defended by literary and cultural critic Michel Vézina.

GG Awards

The Governor General’s Literary Awards were announced yesterday.  M.G. Vassanji won for his memoir A Place Within: Rediscovering India.  Kate Pullinger, who grew up in Canada and now lives in the U.K., won for her Victorian-era novel The Mistress of Nothing.  Kevin Loring won for his first ever play, Where the Blood Mixes (he’s also an accomplished actor). North Vancouver poet David Zieroth won for The Fly in Autumn.

Laidlaw Library has purchased all these books; here are links to the library catalogue:

• A Place Within: Rediscovering India / M.G. Vassanji
• The Mistress of Nothing / Kate Pullinger
• Where the Blood Mixes / Kevin Loring
• The Fly in Autumn / David Zieroth

The Bishop’s Man

 

Fifth Estate host Linden MacIntyre has won the Giller Prize for his novel The Bishop’s Man!

Set in Cape Breton, the novel deals with the timely issue of sexual abuse by priests and coverups by the church hierarchy. Here’s a review of the book from Quill & Quire.

The other shortlisted titles were The Disappeared by Kim Echlin, Fall by Colin McAdam, The Golden Mean by Annabel Lyon, and The Winter Vault by Anne Michaels.

 

More

The winner of this year’s Toronto Book Award is More, Austin Clarke’s novel about a single mother faced with the news that her son is involved in gang crime.

The Toronto Book Awards honours books that are “evocative of Toronto.”  The other finalists this year were Anthony De Sa’s novel Barnacle Love, Maggie Helwig’s novel Girls Fall Down, and two non-fiction books: Unbuilt Toronto: A History of the City that Might Have Been, and In the Land of Long Fingernails: A Gravedigger’s Memoir.

The Hemingses of Monticello

The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family won the Pulitzer Prize for history yesterday.  This is the second big American award this book has won (earlier, it won the National Book Award for non-fiction).   It sounds really interesting — here’s a review from the New York Times.

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

If you’re looking for some entertaining reading, I recommend The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie. It’s about an eleven-year-old girl who sets out to solve a murder that’s taken place in the garden of her family’s estate, in 1950s rural England. This brilliant, spunky girl is always a few steps ahead of the police.

I love hearing about people accomplishing new things when they’re “no spring chicken,” and that’s the case with 70-year-old Canadian author Alan Bradley — this is his first novel! What’s more, he set it in England, a place he had never visited until he won the Debut Dagger award for an early draft of this book, and the Crime Writers’ Association invited him over to receive his award.

An imperfect offering

Dr. James Orbinski, of U of T’s Munk Centre, has won this year’s Shaughessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing, for his book An imperfect offering: humanitarian action in the twenty-first century, available at Laidlaw Library. For more about Orbinski and his book, see this  interesting article from U of T Magazine.

Award-winning books

I recently put up a display of award-winning books that are available at Laidlaw Library. I put a photo of the display in Flickr and added “notes” and links. So if you mouse over a book cover, you can see what award it won, and you can get a link to our catalogue to find out more about the book and where to find it. (Thanks to Clemens & Alcuin Libraries, from whom I borrowed this idea.)

Naomi Klein wins the first Warwick Prize

UC alumna Naomi Klein is the first winner of the Warwick Prize for Writing, for her book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. This new £50,000 prize will be given every two years, focusing on a different theme each time; this year’s theme was “complexity,” and the 2011 theme will be “colour”. The prize is given by the University of Warwick, which I visited, along with nearby Warwick Castle, a few years ago.

Through Black Spruce

Joseph Boyden won the Giller Prize on Monday for his novel Through Black Spruce. I thought it was a nice coincidence that he won it on Remembrance Day, since his previous novel, the bestselling Three Day Road, is about a First Nations soldier returning home from World War I.