LIT, WITH LOVE
A gift guide for readers of all kinds,
I know, I know, there are hundreds of books out there. Beautiful books. Big books. Fascinating books. So what to give the people on your list, the ones who deserve a volume to escape to, learn from, escape with? Here, check out some of the books we’ll be giving this holiday season.
FICTION PRIZE WINNERS
Everyone’s heard of them, everyone’s talking about them — books by the winners of the big fiction awards top our lists of must-reads for the year.
Bellevue Square, Michael Redhill (Doubleday Canada)
The big Canadian book this year, the winner of the $100,000 2017 Giller Prize, is feeling the Giller effect. It hit the bestsellers list right after winning in late November. Lit lovers and Toronto watchers both will have their eye on this particular prize — the book, “a darkly comic, literary thriller” is set mostly in the very recognizable Kensington Market, with the lead character fearing for her sanity when she becomes aware that her doppelganger has appeared in the market’s Bellevue Square.
Lincoln in the Bardo, George Saunders (Random House)
This was one of the first books out in 2017 and the buzz kept up throughout the year, particularly after it won the Man Booker Prize. Saunders has always been well regarded for his short fiction, but with this latest volume, he went in a whole new direction, writing a novel that told its story using a variety of different characters and voices intermingled through- out the book.
The Power, Naomi Alderman The idea has appeared in more than one book of speculative fiction this year: what if women had all the power?
Alderman’s take won her the Bailey Prize for Women’s Fiction. The idea is a new force gives women and teenage girls such strong power that they can cause men agoniz- ing pain and death with electro-magnetic shocks from a flick of their fingers. The jury cited the book’s “brilliantly imagined dystopia, her big ideas and her fantastic imagination.”
Brother, David Chariandy (McClelland & Stewart)
Winner of the Rogers Writers Trust Award, Brother is a beautifully written and powerful book that tells the story of two Black brothers growing up in Scarborough’s housing projects. Chariandy’s understated prose commands dignity, explores the immigrant experience and creates an empathetic and hopeful conversation.
We’ll All Be Burnt in Our Beds Some Night, Joel Thomas Hynes (Harper Perennial)
What could be more Canadian than an epic hitchhiking journey across the country? Hynes won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction this year with this book, which was described in the Star as observing “a small, raw slice of a culture that won’t appear in tourism ads or Broadway musicals, but one that is universal to hardscrabble small-town life.” Raw, gritty and a very good read.
Sing, Unburied, Sing, Jesmyn Ward (Scribner)
Ward’s book started creating a buzz even before it hit the bookshelves in September. And then it won the U.S.’s National Book Award (her previous book, 2011’s Salvage the Bones, also won). It’s the readable, epic and heartbreaking story of a Black family in Mississippi who survived a hurricane and are dealing with drug addiction. Ward’s been called the heir to William Faulkner and this book proves why.