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2025 Governor General’s Literary Awards Finalists
Congratulations to all of the nominees and winners of the Governor General’s Literary Awards! Browse the LPG member finalists in the categories of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, drama, young people’s literature, and translation, below.
All Books in this Collection
Showing 1–16 of 17 results
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10:10
$22.00Longlisted, Nelson Ball Prize
Escaping from the evils of the modern world into the vivid colours of a bird’s plumage, Michael Trussler’s 10:10 plunges into the mystery and horror of living at the beginning of the Anthropocene. How can there be both terrible violence and extraordinary beauty in the world? How can birdwatching coexist with genocide? How can nature be loved and destroyed all at once?
Trussler’s poetic voice is delightfully fluid: moments and images from movies, aesthetic theory, and animal life collide in each poem, sometimes in a single line. From lyrics to prose, high art to emails, Trussler sifts through the shards of society to seek refuge in the beauty and strangeness of words, the beguiling richness of images, the intensity of the natural world.
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A Drop in the Ocean
$19.95An engaging YA novel about a girl in treatment for obsessive compulsive disorder that combats the dehumanizing stigma around mental illness
Sixteen-year-old Mira Durand has just been checked into the secure unit of the Residency Adolescent Treatment Centre for obsessive compulsive and comorbid disorders. Four years of being passed around different psych wards like a hot potato have only worsened her OCD and anorexia. Her brutal, religious compulsions, which she believes keep her mom safe, make her less of a clean freak and more of a freak freak. No wonder her only friend is her journal.
At the Residency’s Ward 2, Mira discovers that her shrink is a fellow fantasy nerd and that her wardmates have enough of their own high-risk behaviours to tolerate hers. The complex friendships she forms with them (including a first love), the slow trust she builds with her treatment team, and the outside and family visits she earns give her things to look forward to beyond the drudgery of her compulsions. But it takes visiting Gung Gung, her dying maternal grandfather, for her to realize that to truly live, she must fight the cognitive distortions at the heart of her compulsions.
Based on the author’s personal experience, A Drop in the Ocean is a gritty, humanizing portrait of living with mental illness.
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All Our Ordinary Stories
$24.95Longlisted for Canada Reads 2025
WINNER of 2 Alberta Literary Awards (the Memoir Award and the Wilfrid Eggleston Award for Nonfiction)
From the author of Dear Scarlet comes a graphic memoir about the obstacles one daughter faces as she attempts to connect with her immigrant parents
Beginning with her mother’s stroke in 2014, Teresa Wong takes us on a moving journey through time and place to locate the beginnings of the disconnection she feels from her parents. Through a series of stories – some epic, like her mother and father’s daring escapes from communes during China’s Cultural Revolution, and some banal, like her quitting Chinese school to watch Saturday morning cartoons – Wong carefully examines the cultural, historical, language, and personality barriers to intimacy in her family, seeking answers to the questions “Where did I come from?” and “Where are we going?” At the same time, she discovers how storytelling can bridge distances and help make sense of a life.
A book for children of immigrants trying to honour their parents’ pasts while also making a different kind of future for themselves, All Our Ordinary Stories is poignant in its understated yet nuanced depictions of complicated family dynamics. Wong’s memoir is a heartfelt exploration of identity and inheritance, as well as a testament to the transformative power of stories both told and untold.
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Baldwin, Styron, and Me
$22.95Finalist for the 2025 John Glassco Translation Prize
An unlikely literary friendship from the past sheds light on the radicalization of public debate around identity, race, and censorship.
In 1961, James Baldwin spent several months in William Styron’s guest house. The two wrote during the day, then spent evenings confiding in each other and talking about race in America. During one of those conversations, Baldwin is said to have convinced his friend to write, in first person, the story of the 1831 slave rebellion led by Nat Turner. The Confessions of Nat Turner was published to critical acclaim, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1968, and also creating outrage in part of the African American community.
Decades later, the controversy around cultural appropriation, identity, and the rights and responsibilities of the writer still resonates. In Baldwin, Styron, and Me, Mélikah Abdelmoumen considers the writers’ surprising yet vital friendship from her standpoint as a racialized woman torn by the often unidimensional versions of her identity put forth by today’s politics and media. Considering questions of identity, race, equity, and the often contentious public debates about these topics, Abdelmoumen works to create a space where the answers are found by first learning how to listen—even in disagreement.
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Bog Myrtle
$22.99Best Books of 2024 lists: NYPL, New York Magazine, Quill & Quire • JLG Gold Standard Selection • Moonbeam Children’s Book Award Winner • Kids Indie Next Pick • Eisner Award nomination
From the Eisner-nominated creator of The Wolf Suit comes another weirdly hilarious, masterfully thought-provoking, and lushly painted early reader graphic novel.
Two sisters, one stubbornly cheerful (Beatrice) and one relentlessly grumpy (Magnolia), live in a drafty old house with a family of helpful spiders. When Beatrice is gifted magic yarn from a giant forest spider obsessed with sustainability named Bog Myrtle, she and the spiders set to work knitting up a perfectly warm sweater.
But greedy Magnolia sees only the opportunity for profit, and quickly converts the old house into a magic sweater factory. The exhausted spiders are driven to strike, and Bog Myrtle is not pleased . . .
Bog Myrtle is a witty modern folktale that touches on themes of capitalism, environmentalism, labor rights, and being a nice person.
“I adore this book as much as I adore empowered spiders, poker-faced narrators, and cooperative bookstores. It’s wry, whip-smart, and freaking gorgeous. Sid Sharp is a maestro of comic timing and subversion.” —Kyo Maclear, author of It Began With a Page
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Downed Hearts
$18.95Ten days after an air-sea disaster, an island fisherman struggles to recover from the aftermath of his participation in the rescue-turned-recovery operation of a downed jetliner. Aaron’s mental fragility is compounded by his wife’s recent decision to take their twelve-year-old special needs son to live off-island so that he will get better schooling. Aaron, determined to regain his equilibrium, boards his small boat and heads out to where he feels most at peace, on the ocean. When he returns to shore hours later with a young mute woman, the question foremost in everyone’s mind is, “Who is she?” But more concerning to Aaron’s mother is whether Aaron might really believe he has found a lone survivor. Downed Hearts is a play that delves into the possibility that healing sometimes comes to us in mysterious ways.
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Fall On Your Knees
$20.95In an adaptation of the classic Canadian novel, this epic play follows three generations of a Cape Breton Island family in a tale of forbidden love, inescapable bonds, and devastating betrayals, all while harbouring secrets that threaten to shatter the family entirely.
At the dawn of the twentieth century, a young piano tuner named James Piper and thirteen-year-old Materia Mahmoud fall into a whirlwind romance. As their family grows, the couple is strained by dark revelations that lead to dangerous consequences. Their headstrong daughters Kathleen, Frances, Mercedes, and Lily grow up haunted but fiercely connected in ways they must learn to fully understand. A richly layered story by turns both heartbreaking and joyous, Fall On Your Knees is a vivid portrayal of love, desire, and the quest for truth and redemption.
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Farida
$22.95Translated from French by Phyllis Aronoff and Howard Scott.
Farida, a young woman in Tunis, is passionate about reading and loves the French language. But she is compelled to marry Kamel, a brute of a man, who drinks, keeps mistresses, and beats her when she talks back. But she is defiant, and takes comfort from her secret reading. The country is a French colony and male-dominated. Finally after ten years she is granted a divorce by the courts and lives with her son Tewfiq. A smoking, independent-minded divorcee, she sees the country attain its freedom from the French and its arrival into modern times; the growth of her son into a young public servant; and her granddaughter Leila mature into an independent, educated young woman. This is a novel of modern Tunisia told through the lives of its women.
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Island
$22.00Winner, J.M. Abraham Atlantic Poetry Award
Longlisted, First Nation Communities READ“Canada rejected our applications for enrolment in the Qalipu First Nation. Initially, I was relieved by the rejection. I’d watched my hometown divide itself — are you Mi′kmaq or settler? Mi′kmaq or not Mi′kmaq enough?”
Centred around the Newfoundland Mi’kmaq experience in the wake of the controversial Qalipu First Nation enrolment process, Island wades through the fracture and mistrust that continues to linger in many communities. In this new collection, Douglas Walbourne-Gough expands upon issues of identity and history that he introduced in Crow Gulch, offering a deeply personal and equally beautiful exploration of Mi’kmaw and Newfoundland identity.
Walbourne-Gough’s narrative poems trace the formation of identity, not through status documentation, but through its deeper roots in childhood memories, family, spirituality, and dreams. Throughout this collection, he approaches life in fragments — snuggling into his nan’s sealskin snowsuit, learning Mi’kmaq from an app, or the myriad of complex emotions that come with receiving a status card — and watches them transform into pieces of an everlasting puzzle. Island reckons with an often-ignored, yet persistent, effect of colonialism — fractured identities.
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Juiceboxers
$24.95A finalist for the Amazon Canada First Novel Award, a powerful debut novel about four young soldiers serving in Afghanistan, and the devastating aftermath of war.
Winner of the 2025 Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize
Finalist for the 2025 Amazon Canada First Novel Award
“An unvarnished, intimately informed dissection of war’s physical and emotional derangements.” – Omar El Akkad, author of What Strange Paradise and American War
Sixteen-year-old Plinko is attending basic training before high school starts up again in the fall. Feeling adrift from his own family, he moves in with an older soldier, where he forges an unlikely group of friends in the military: the very tall Walsh, who moves in shortly after Plinko does; Abdi, whose Somali immigrant parents often welcome the group of young men over for dinner; and the unpredictable and gun-loving Krug, who is brash and exasperating yet magnetic.
After 9/11, the military prepares to move into Afghanistan — to go to war. Plinko and his friends have no idea that the trajectory of their lives is about to be irrevocably altered.
Drawn from the author’s experiences as a soldier in Afghanistan, Juiceboxers tenderly traces the story of a young man’s journey from basic training, to the battlefields of Kandahar, to the inner city of Edmonton, braiding together questions of masculinity and militarism, friendship and white supremacy, loss and trauma and hard-won recovery.
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Little Pretty and The Exceptional
$18.95In the vibrant heart of Toronto’s Gerrard India Bazaar, Dilpreet and his daughters, Jasmeet and Simran, are frantically preparing to open their new sari shop in time for Canada Day. While Jasmeet prepares designs for the store’s logo and signs, she is also preparing for her high-school prom. Meanwhile, Simran anxiously awaits her LSAT scores that will grant her access to the best law schools in the country. Amidst the flurry of activity, Simran experiences a mental-health crisis, threatening to derail not only her future but the family’s shared dream. As she spirals into a dangerous breakdown, the family’s dedication to their shop and to each other is put to the ultimate test.
Little Pretty and The Exceptional is a candid and compassionate portrait of a family haunted by a traumatic past, exposing the stigmas surrounding mental health in the South Asian community. This heartfelt tale reveals what it truly means to support and care for our loved ones during their darkest times.
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May Our Joy Endure
$24.95A Walrus Best Book of Fall 2024 • A Globe 100 Best Book of 2024 • A CBC Best Fiction Book of the Year • Winner of the 2023 Prix Médicis, Prix Décembre, and Prix Ringuet
Céline Wachowski, internationally renowned architect and accidental digital-culture icon, unveils her plans for the Webuy Complex, her first megaproject in Montreal, her hometown. But instead of the triumph she anticipates in finally bringing her reputation to bear in her own city, the project is excoriated by critics, who accuse her of callously destroying the social fabric of neighborhoods, ushering in a new era of gentrification, and many even deadlier sins. When she is deposed as CEO of her firm, Céline must make sense of the charges against herself and the people in her elite circle. For the first time in danger of losing their footing, what fictions must they tell themselves to justify their privilege and maintain their position in the world that they themselves have built?
Moving fluidly between Céline’s perspective and the perspectives of her critics, and revealing both the ruthlessness of her methods and the brilliance of her aesthetic vision, May Our Joy Endure is a shrewd examination of the microcosm of the ultra-privileged and a dazzling social novel that depicts with razor-sharp acuity the terrible beauty of wealth, influence, and art.
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Rise, Red River
$18.95“The map of the land is in our blood.”
A woman trawls the bottom of a riverbed with a makeshift plough, hoping to dislodge something—anything. The world has drastically changed: rivers run dry, rampant bushfires leave little left to burn. Still she persists searching for the stories of her loved ones, maybe even her own. She is not alone—an ancestor watches nearby. This desolate landscape is about to unearth its long-held secrets.
Inspired by the grassroots organization Drag the Red, which searches for evidence of missing Indigenous and settler women, girls, 2 Spirit, and people of all genders in the Red River of Treaty One Territory, this ethereal and engrossing drama is a profound offering to those who persevere in spite of sorrow. Told in Anishinaabemowin, English, and French, Tara Beagan’s prophetic play draws a direct connection between the treatment of Indigenous peoples and the abuse inflicted on the land. Fluid and majestic like the river itself, Rise, Red River is an invocation, a revelation, and a call to action.
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Searching for Serafim
$21.95Finalist, Governor General’s Literary Award
The life and legacy of Serafim “Joe” Fortes, a trailblazing Black lifeguard, who became a cultural icon in a racist society
Searching for Serafim is a layered exploration of the life of Vancouver’s first lifeguard, Serafim “Joe” Fortes. A Trinidad native who arrived on the shores of Canada in 1885, Fortes was heralded as a hero in Vancouver for saving dozens of people from drowning, and his funeral drew the largest crowd ever recorded in the city’s history. Since his passing, Fortes has been commemorated with a Canada Post-issued stamp and local buildings named in his honour. Yet, little has been discussed about how he navigated an openly white supremacist society as an Afro Latino man.
In Searching for Serafim, author Ruby Smith Diaz seeks to unravel the complicated legacy of a local legend to learn more about who Fortes was as a person. She draws from historical documents to form an insightful critique of the role that settler colonialism and anti-Black racism played in Fortes’s publicized story and reconstructs his life, from over a century later, through a contemporary Black perspective, weaving poetry and personal reflections alongside archival research.
The result is a moving and thought-provoking book about displacement, identity, and dignity. Searching for Serafim conjures a new side to one of Vancouver’s most beloved – and misunderstood – public figures.
With black-and-white photos.
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The Ministry of Grace
$18.95It’s 1950 in the deserts of Southern California. Evangelist Brother Cain has a booming trade; his tent revival show moves from town to town, fleecing crowds desperate for something to believe in. When he discovers Mary, a Ntlaka’pamux woman from BC’s Nicola Valley, reading the Bible, he puts her onstage, renames her Grace, and displays her as a miracle: an Indian who can read. A grand, sweeping story of friendship and redemption, The Ministry of Grace is a powerful look at people struggling to live, love, and retain dignity in a heartless world.
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Uiesh / Somewhere
$19.95Winner of the Prix des libraires, the Indigenous Voices award, the Prix littéraire des enseignant.e.s de Français, and the Coup de Cœur Renaud-Bray, finalist for the Prix Alain-Grandbois, and finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation
Dual-language edition
The poems in Uiesh / Somewhere are rooted in Innu Elder Joséphine Bacon’s experiences of moving between the nomadic ways of her Ancestors in the northern wilderness of Nitassinan and the clamour of the city. Wherever she is, Bacon is attentive to the smallest details of her environment, from the moon and the stars, the Northern Lights, and the falling snow, to the sirens of fire engines and the noise of a busy bar night. From her quiet centre, she listens to the voices of the Old Ones, whose stories are alive within her, and reflects on the beauty and the pain of her long life.