Award
Giller Prize
The Giller Prize is one of Canada’s most prestigious literary awards, recognizing excellence in Canadian fiction, including novels and short story collections. Awarded annually, it honours the best in Canadian storytelling and awards $100,000 to the winner and $10,000 to each finalist.
2025
Pick a Color
Ning is a retired boxer, but to the customers who visit her nail salon, she is just another worker named Susan. On this summer's day, much like any other, the Susans buff and clip and polish and tweeze. They listen and smile and nod. But beneath this superficial veneer, Ning is a woman of rigorous...
2024
Held
1917. On a battlefield near the River Escaut, John lies in the aftermath of a blast, unable to move or feel his legs. Struggling to focus his thoughts, he is lost to memory as the snow falls—a chance encounter in a pub by a railway, a hot bath with his lover on a winter night.
1920. John has...
2023
Study for Obedience
A young woman moves from the place of her birth to the remote northern country of her forebears to be housekeeper to her brother, whose wife has recently left him. Soon after her arrival, a series of inexplicable events occurs—collective bovine hysteria; the demise of a ewe and her nearly born lamb;...
2022
The Sleeping Car Porter
The Sleeping Car Porter brings to life an important part of Black history in North America, from the perspective of a queer man living in a culture that renders him invisible in two ways. Affecting, imaginative, and visceral enough that you’ll feel the rocking of the train, The Sleeping Car Porter...
2021
What Strange Paradise
More bodies have washed up on the shores of a small island. Another overfilled, ill-equipped, dilapidated ship has sunk under the weight of its too many passengers: Syrians, Ethiopians, Egyptians, Lebanese, Palestinians, all of them desperate to escape untenable lives back in their homelands. But...
2020
How to Pronounce Knife
A failed boxer painting nails at the local salon.
A woman plucking feathers at a chicken processing plant.
A housewife learning English from daytime soap operas.
A mother teaching her daughter the art of worm harvesting.
In her stunning debut story collection, O. Henry Award winner Souvankham...
2019
Reproduction
Felicia, a nineteen-year-old student from a West Indian family, and Edgar, the lazy-minded and impetuous heir of a wealthy German family, meet by chance when their ailing mothers are assigned the same hospital room.
After the death of Felicia’s mother and the recovery of Edgar’s, Felicia drops out...
2018
Washington Black
Eleven-year-old George Washington Black—or Wash—a field slave on a Barbados sugar plantation, is initially terrified when he is chosen as the manservant of his master’s brother. To his surprise, however, the eccentric Christopher Wilde turns out to be a naturalist, explorer, inventor, and...
2017
Bellevue Square
Jean Mason has a doppelganger. She's never seen her, but others swear they have. Apparently, her identical twin hangs out in Kensington Market, where she sometimes buys churros and drags an empty shopping cart down the streets, like she's looking for something to put in it.
Jean's a grown woman...
2016
Do Not Say We Have Nothing
Master storyteller Madeleine Thien takes us inside an extended family in China, showing us the lives of two successive generations—those who lived through Mao’s Cultural Revolution and their children, who became the students protesting in Tiananmen Square.
At the center of this epic story are two...
2015
Fifteen Dogs
— I wonder, said Hermes, what it would be like if animals had human intelligence.
— I'll wager a year's servitude, answered Apollo, that animals – any animal you like – would be even more unhappy than humans are, if they were given human intelligence.
And so it begins: a bet between the gods...
2014
Us Conductors
Locked in a cabin aboard a ship bearing him back to Russia and away from the love of his life, Lev Sergeyvich Termen begins to type his story: a tale of electricity, romance, and the invention of the world’s strangest instrument, the theremin. He recollects his early years as a scientist forging...
2013
Hellgoing
A young nun charged with talking an anorexic out of her religious fanaticism toys with the thin distance between practicality and blasphemy.
A strange bond between a teacher and a schoolgirl takes on ever deeper, and stranger, shapes as the years progress.
A bride-to-be with a penchant for...
2012
419
A car tumbles through darkness down a snowy ravine. A woman without a name walks out of a dust storm in sub-Saharan Africa. And in the seething heat of Lagos City, a criminal cartel scours the Internet, looking for victims. Lives intersect. Worlds collide. And it all begins with a single email:...
2011
Half-Blood Blues
Berlin, 1939. The Hot Time Swingers, a popular jazz band, has been forbidden to play by the Nazis. Their young trumpet-player Hieronymus Falk, declared a musical genius by none other than Louis Armstrong, is arrested in a Paris café. He is never heard from again. He was twenty years old, a German...
2010
The Sentimentalists
Haunted by the vivid horrors of the Vietnam War, exhausted from years spent battling his memories, Napoleon Haskell leaves his North Dakota trailer and moves to Canada. He retreats to a small Ontario town where Henry, the father of his fallen Vietnam comrade, has a home on the shore of a man-made...
2009
The Bishop's Man
Father Duncan MacAskill has spent most of his priesthood as the "Exorcist"—an enforcer employed by his bishop to discipline wayward priests and suppress potential scandal. He knows all of the devious ways that lonely priests persuade themselves that their needs trump their vows, but he's about to be...
2008
Through Black Spruce
This is the story of two immensely compelling characters: Will Bird, a legendary Cree bush pilot who lies comatose in a remote Ontario hospital; and Annie Bird, Will's niece, a beautiful loner and trapper who has come to sit beside her uncle's bed.
Broken in different ways, the two take silent...
2007
Late Nights on Air
It’s 1975 when beautiful Dido Paris arrives at the radio station in Yellowknife, a frontier town in the Canadian north. She disarms hard–bitten broadcaster Harry Boyd and electrifies the station, setting into motion rivalries both professional and sexual.
As the drama at the station unfolds, a...
2006
Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures
Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures follows a group of medical students as they move from the intensity of training into the realities of practicing medicine. Beginning with their early days in medical school, the stories trace their evolving friendships, ambitions, and the pressures that come with...
2005
The Time In Between
In search of love, absolution, or forgiveness, Charles Boatman leaves the Fraser Valley of British Columbia and returns mysteriously to Vietnam, the country where he fought twenty-nine years earlier as a young, reluctant soldier. But his new encounters seem irreconcilable with his memories.
When he...
2004
Runaway
Runaway is a book of extraordinary stories about love and its infinite betrayals and surprises, from the title story about a young woman who, though she thinks she wants to, is incapable of leaving her husband, to three stories about a woman named Juliet and the emotions that complicate the luster...
2003
The In-Between World of Vikram Lall
Vikram Lall comes of age in 1950s Kenya, at the same time that the colony is struggling towards independence. Against the unsettling backdrop of Mau Mau violence, Vic and his sister Deepa, the grandchildren of an Indian railroad worker, search for their place in a world sharply divided between...
2002
The Polished Hoe
On a Caribbean island shaped by its plantation past, Mary-Mathilda, a woman from a small village, is brought in for questioning after the killing of a powerful landowner. Over the course of a long night, she recounts her life story to the local authorities, revealing the circumstances that led to...
2001
Clara Callan
Set during the 1930s, Clara Callan follows two sisters whose lives unfold along very different paths. Clara remains in their small Ontario town, working as a schoolteacher and caring for their ailing father, while her sister Nora leaves for New York City to pursue a career in radio and performance....
2000
Mercy Among the Children
At the age of twelve, Sidney Henderson, in a moment of anger, pushes his friend Connie Devlin off the roof of a local church. Looking down on Connie’s motionless body, Sidney believes he is dead. Let Connie live and I will never harm another soul, Sidney vows. At that moment, Connie stands up and,...
Anil's Ghost
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...
1999
A Good House
Set in a small Ontario town, A Good House follows several families whose lives become quietly intertwined over the course of decades. Through shifting perspectives, the novel traces marriages, friendships, and everyday routines, revealing how ordinary moments—dinners, conversations, small...
1998
The Love of a Good Woman
Mining the silences and dark discretions of provincial life, the eight tales in The Love of a Good Woman lay bare the seamless connections and shared guilt that bind even the loneliest of individuals. A stroke victim expresses his deepest secret to a young bride in what may be the last act of...
1997
Barney's Version
Barney Panofsky—Canadian expat, wily lover of women, writer, television producer, raconteur—is finally putting pen to paper so he can rebut the charges about him made in his rival’s autobiography.
Whether it’s ranting about his bohemian misadventures during the 1950s in Paris, his tumultuous three...
1996
Alias Grace
It's 1843, and Grace Marks has been convicted for her involvement in the vicious murders of her employer and his housekeeper and mistress. Some believe Grace is innocent; others think her evil or insane. Now serving a life sentence, Grace claims to have no memory of the murders.
An up-and-coming...
1995
A Fine Balance
With a compassionate realism and narrative sweep that recall the work of Charles Dickens, this magnificent novel captures all the cruelty and corruption, dignity and heroism, of India.
The time is 1975. The place is an unnamed city by the sea. The government has just declared a State of Emergency,...
1994
The Book of Secrets
The Book of Secrets is a spellbinding novel of generations and the sweep of history that begins in 1988 in Dar es Salaam, when the 1913 diary of a British colonial officer is found in a shopkeeper's back room. The diary enflames the curiosity of a retired schoolteacher, Pius Fernandes, whose...