23rd Annual Trillium Book Award Finalists

Margaret Atwood: The Year of the Flood (McClelland & Stewart)

This long-awaited novel from Margaret Atwood is a brilliant visionary imagining of the future that calls to mind her classic novel The Handmaid’s Tale. A natural disaster has occurred obliterating most human life and altering Earth as we know it. Two women, Ren and Toby, have been spared and their stories unfold in this novel which brilliantly reflects to us a world we recognize but poignantly reminds us of our enduring humanity.

Ian Brown: The Boy in the Moon (Random House Canada)

Walker Brown was born with a genetic mutation so rare that doctors call it an orphan syndrome: perhaps 300 people around the world also live with it. Walker turns twelve in 2008, but he weighs only 54 pounds, is still in diapers, can’t speak and needs to wear special cuffs on his arms so that he can’t continually hit himself. Told with tenderness and stark honesty, Ian Brown infuses his book with love for his amazing son, for his family and for life.

Alexandra Leggat: Animal (Anvil Press)

In a style reminiscent of Raymond Carver, the stories contained in Animal depict people on the brink of major life change. They stand at crossroads they are often oblivious to; they suck thick air in rooms filled with palpable tension. It matters little whether the characters take action or refuse to act; life acts for them. The reader is left to wonder: When does “meaning” cease to have meaning? Like travelling a mountain highway at night, what’s just around the next bend is never known. The stories in Animal never fail to deliver potent surprises.

Alexandra Leggat is the author of two previous collections of short fiction, Pull Gently, Tear Here (nominated for the Danuta Gleed First Fiction Award), Meet Me in the Parking Lot, and a volume of poetry entitled This is me since yesterday. As well as being a freelance writer and editor, she teaches creative writing classes through the University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies and lives in Toronto.

Anne Michaels: The Winter Vault (McClelland & Stewart)

Anne Michaels’s first work of fiction in more than a decade, The Winter Vault is a stunning, richly layered, and timeless novel that is everything we could hope for - and more. Set in Canada and Egypt and with flashbacks to England and Poland after the war, it is a spellbinding love story that juxtaposes momentous historical events with the most intimate moments of individual lives.

Anne Michaels is the author of three highly acclaimed poetry collections: The Weight of Oranges, which won the Commonwealth Prize for the Americas; Miner’s Pond, which received the Canadian Authors Association Award and was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award and the Trillium Award, and Skin Divers. Her international, bestselling novel, Fugitive Pieces, was on the national bestseller list for more than two years. It also won numerous national and international awards, including the Trillium Book Award, City of Toronto Book Award, and the Orange Prize for Fiction.

Alice Munro: Too Much Happiness (McClelland & Stewart)

A new collection of ten short stories from a beloved and internationally acclaimed author.

While some of the stories are traditional, set in “Alice Munro Country” in Ontario or in B.C., dealing with ordinary women’s lives, others have a new, sharper edge. They involve child murders, strange sex, and a terrifying home invasion. By way of astonishing variety, the title story, set in Victorian Europe, follows the last journey from France to Sweden of a famous Russian mathematician.

Emily Schultz: Heaven is Small (House of Anansi Press)

Heaven is Small is the funny and profound story of Gordon Small, a degree-clutching slacker and failed fiction writer. Gordon is also, we discover in the first paragraph, recently deceased -- "an event he failed to notice." But when Gordon finds himself suddenly employed at the Heaven Book Company, the world's largest romance publisher, he does notice that things are odd. With sly deadpan humour, brilliant insight into the human condition, and exceptionally beautiful writing, Schultz explores what it's like to be truly alive only after you're dead.

Cordelia Strube: Lemon (Coach House Books)

Lemon has three mothers and one deadbeat dad. High school is a misery, a trial run for an unhappy adulthood of bloated waistlines, bad sex, contradictions and inequities, and nothing guidance counselor Blecher can say will convince Lemon otherwise. But making the choice to opt out of sex and violence and cancer and disappointment doesn’t mean that these things don’t find you. It will be up to Lemon if she can survive them with her usual cavalier aplomb.

Susan Holbrook: Joy is so Exhausting (Coach House Books)

Joyfully melding knowing humour and wordplay, Holbrook’s collection is a comic fusion of the experimental and the experiential, the procedural and the lyric. Her poems don’t use humour as much as they deconstruct the comic impulse, exposing its roots in the political, the psychological and the emotional life of the mind. Many of the poems import shapes and source texts from elsewhere in a series of translations, transpositions and transgressions that invite a more intimate and critical rapport with the written word.

Karen Solie: Pigeon (House of Anansi Press)

Karen Solie’s first collection of poems, Short Haul Engine, launched her writing career to prominence, winning many awards and citations. She continued her upward trajectory with Modern and Normal and this collection is another leap forward. The poems are X-rays of our delusions and mistaken perceptions, explorations of violence, bad luck, fate, creeping catastrophe, love, and the eros of danger. Once again, Solie shows that her ear is impeccable, her poetic intelligence rare and razor-sharp.

Matthew Tierney: The Hayflick Limit (Coach House Books)

The Hayflick Limit concerns itself with boundaries of the cosmic and sub-atomic – how the mind contains both – and the sadsack creatures in the nexus, human beings. What does it mean to be an intelligent species? What does it mean to be an intelligent person? Shifting focus between the limits of the telescope and the limits of the microscope, the poems in Matthew Tierney's second collection place a premium on inventiveness while embracing extremes of fear, pain, cognition and time.

Publisher link: http://www.chbooks.com/catalogue/hayflick_limit

Ryad Assani-Razaki, Deux cercles (VLB éditeur)

This first collection by Ryad Assani-Razaki, a young writer who shows surprising maturity, deals with discrimination and exclusion. Each short story in Deux cercles is about a point in an individual’s life where the person has to face the difficulties and frustrations of immigration.

Publisher link: http://www.edvlb.com/ficheProduit.aspx?codeprod=336224

Nicole V. Champeau, Pointe Maligne : L’infiniment oubliée (Les Éditions du Vermillon)

Pointe Maligne : L’infiniment oubliée is about the Ontario section of the St. Lawrence River, from Lac Saint-François up toward Cornwall (Pointe Maligne) and on to the Thousand Islands. The author invites us to follow her in a journey that creates a poetry of history out of the writings, maps, and personalities of those who lived and traveled in the area in centuries past. The book revives the memory of places that disappeared with the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway and the flooding of the Long Sault Rapids.

Jean Mohsen Fahmy: Frères ennemis (VLB éditeur)

In Europe in 1914, World War I united the French around patriotism. But in this country, it divided French-Canadians, torn between the desire to sign up to stand beside their “cousins” and the refusal to march under the banner of the British Empire. This Conscription Crisis, a key period in the history of Quebec, is embodied by two twin brothers, who are identical in every way yet choose different paths. One enrols and leaves home to fight in Flanders, while the other stays to defend the rights of the French-Canadian “race” against the English.

Born in Cairo, Egypt, Jean Mohsen Fahmy now lives in Orleans, near Ottawa.

Daniel Poliquin, René Lévesque (Les Éditions du Boréal)

The Franco-Ontarian novelist and essayist Daniel Poliquin has always been a keen observer of Quebec politics. Poliquin portrays an extraordinarily likeable René Lévesque, bringing out his deep human and moral qualities as few books have done. As always with Poliquin, the writer’s passion for history – small-h or capital-H ­– and his talent for the juicy anecdote make this René Lévesque an unforgettable read.

Daniel Poliquin is a writer and literary translator. He was born in Ottawa on December 18, 1953. His best-known novels are La côte de sable (1990), L’Écureuil noir (1994), L’homme de paille (1998 Trillium Book Award) and La Kermesse. His essay In the Name of the Father earned Poliquin the 2002 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing in Canada. Daniel Poliquin holds a Ph.D. and is a Chevalier de l’Ordre de la Pléiade, a recipient of the Queen’s Jubilee Medal, a member of the Order of Canada, a doctor honoris causa of the University of Ottawa and a Chevalier de l’Ordre des arts et lettres de la République française.

Daniel Soha, La Maison : une parabole (Éditions du GREF)

A man wakes up one day in a house that he does not know and cannot get out of, with no memory of his own past. Other people are in the house, in the same situation. Gradually, as a struggle for power emerges, the protagonist falls prey to increasingly apocalyptic visions. Is this reality or a dream, and if the latter, did something induce it?

Born in France, Daniel Soha has lived in Great Britain, the United States, Singapore and Canada, where he previously held management positions with the Alliance Française and the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He currently lives in Toronto with his family, in the area of sandy cliffs called the Bluffs, and devotes his time to writing, as a novelist, short-story writer, columnist, translator and literary critic.

Jacqueline Borowick: Le chant du coucou (Inanna Publications)

Through the prism of a marginal child puzzled about her true identity, Le chant de coucou / The Cuckoo’s Song, a collection of 63 poems in French and English, adds vivid flourishes to the drab canvas of the Great Depression and celebrates the indomitable spirit of the men and women who joined the Gold Rush to Val d’Or in Northwestern Quebec, in the 1930s and ‘40s. The community they carved, diverse and inclusive, their struggles, their joie de vivre—filaments of gold in the poet’s memory.

Michèle Matteau: Passerelles (Les Éditions L'Interligne)

Recounting the unfolding of a single day in parallel with the seasons of the year, Michèle Matteau’s first poetry collection, Passerelles, explores the human journey. From the day’s dawning to the last light of dusk, the author recalls voices that have fallen silent and uses lines full of imagery to evoke the stages of their lives, their secret songs and calls for help, torn between joy and pain, certainty and doubt, revolt and acceptance. With lucid understanding, the author uses the stories of their lives to define her own more clearly.