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An ALU History of the Giller Prize
The Giller Prize is one of Canada’s most prestigious national literary awards. Here we take a look back at past winners and nominees to remember some of the great books that have received such high-profile attention.
All Books in this Collection
Showing 1–16 of 21 results
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Arvida
$19.95Finalist for the 2015 Giller Prize
Finalist for the 2016 Best Translated Book Award
Like a Proust-obsessed Cormac McCarthy, Samuel Archibald’s portrait of his hometown is filled with innocent children and wild beasts, attempted murder and ritual mutilation, haunted houses and road trips to nowhere, bad men and mysterious women. Gothic, fantastical, and incandescent, filled with stories of everyday wonder and terror, longing and love, Arvida explores the line which separates memory from story, and heralds the arrival of an important new voice.
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Confidence
$19.95Nominated for the 2015 Giller Prize.
Nominated for the 2015 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize.
In Russell Smith?s darkly brilliant new collection of short stories Confidence, the reader will be introduced to ecstasy-taking PhD students; financial traders desperate for husbands; owners of failing sex stores; violent and unremovable tenants; aggressive raccoons; seedy massage parlours; experimental filmmakers who record every second of their day; wives who blog insults directed at their husbands. There are cheating husbands. There are private clubs, crowded restaurants, psychiatric wards. Every character has a secret of some kind.
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Fifteen Dogs
$19.95An utterly convincing and moving look at the beauty and perils of consciousness.
WINNER OF CANADA READS 2017
WINNER OF THE 2015 GILLER PRIZE
WINNER OF THE 2015 ROGERS WRITERS’ TRUST FICTION PRIZE
FINALIST FOR THE 2015 TORONTO BOOK AWARDS
— 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 Hermes and Apollo leads them to grant human consciousness and language to a group of dogs overnighting at a Toronto veterinary clinic. Suddenly capable of more complex thought, the pack is torn between those who resist the new ways of thinking, preferringthe old ‘dog’ ways, and those who embrace the change. The gods watch from above as the dogs venture into their newly unfamiliar world, as they become divided among themselves, as each struggles with new thoughts and feelings. Wily Benjy moves from home to home, Prince becomes a poet, and Majnoun forges a relationship with a kind couple that stops even the Fates in their tracks.
André Alexis’s contemporary take on the apologue offers an utterly compelling and affecting look at the beauty and perils of human consciousness. By turns meditative and devastating, charming and strange, Fifteen Dogs shows you can teach an old genre new tricks.
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Here the Dark
$22.95SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2020 SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE • A NEW YORK TIMES NEW & NOTEWORTHY BOOK • A GLOBE AND MAIL TOP 100 BOOK FOR 2020 • A CBC BEST FICTION BOOK FOR 2020 • “His third appearance on the Giller shortlist … affirms Bergen among Canada’s most powerful writers. His pages light up; all around falls into darkness.”—2020 Scotiabank Giller Prize Jury • “David Bergen’s command is breathtaking … His work belongs to the world, and to all time. He is one of our living greats.”—Matthew Thomas, New York Times-bestselling author of We Are Not Ourselves
From the streets of Danang, Vietnam, where a boy falls in with a young American missionary, to fishermen lost off the islands of Honduras, to the Canadian prairies, where a teenage boy’s infatuation reveals his naiveté and an aging rancher finds himself smitten, the short stories in Here the Dark explore the spaces between doubt and belief, evil and good, obscurity and light. Following men and boys bewildered by their circumstances and swayed by desire, surprised by love and by their capacity for both tenderness and violence, and featuring a novella about a young woman who rejects the laws of her cloistered Mennonite community, Scotiabank Giller Prize-winner David Bergen’s latest deftly renders complex moral ambiguities and asks what it means to be lost—and how we might be found.
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How to Get Along With Women
$16.95Longlisted for the 2013 Scotiabank Giller Prize
A sharply original debut collection, How To Get Along With Women showcases Elisabeth de Mariaffi’s keen eye and inventive voice. Infused with a close and present danger, these stories tighten the knot around power, identity, and sexuality, and draw the reader into the pivotal moments where-for better or for worse-we see ourselves for what we truly are.
“How to Get Along With Women is at once stunning and daring.”—Canada Arts Connect
“De Mariaffi’s writing is biting and captivating.”—The Book Stylist
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Lemon
$19.95Lemon has three mothers: a biological one she’s never met, her adopted father’s suicidal ex, and Drew, a school principal who hasn’t left the house since she was stabbed by a student. She has one deadbeat dad, one young cancer-riddled protege, and two friends, the school tramp and a depressed poet. Figuring the numbers are against her, Lemon just can’t be bothered trying to fit in. She spurns fashion, television, and even the mall. She reads Mary Wollstonecraft and gets pissed off that Jane Eyre is such a wimp. Meanwhile, the adults in her life are all mired in self-centredness, and the other kids are getting high, beating each other up in parks, and trying to outsex one another. High school is misery, a trial run for an unhappy adulthood of bloated waistlines, bad sex, contradictions, and inequities, and nothing guidance counsellor 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.
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Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century
$21.95WINNER OF THE 26TH ANNUAL DANUTA GLEED LITERARY AWARD
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2022 SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE
KIRKUS REVIEWS BEST BOOKS OF 2022
THE GLOBE 100: THE BEST BOOKS OF 2022
CBC BOOKS: THE BEST CANADIAN FICTION OF 2022
Featured on CBC’s The Next Chapter with Shelagh Rogers
TIME MAGAZINE’S 10 BEST FICTION BOOKS OF 2022
LITHUB BEST REVIEWED SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS 2022
LITHUB BEST REVIEWED SCI-FI, FANTASY AND HORROR OF 2022
LONGLISTED FOR THE 2023 JOYCE CAROL OATES PRIZE
The debut collection from PEN/Hemingway Award finalist and ‘propulsive storyteller’ (NYT Book Review), with stories that are by turns poignant and pulpy
In the twelve unforgettable tales of Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century, the strange is made familiar and the familiar strange, such that a girl growing wings on her legs feels like an ordinary rite of passage, while a bug-infested house becomes an impossible, Kafkaesque nightmare. Each story builds a new world all its own: a group of children steal a haunted doll; a runaway bride encounters a sea monster; a vendor sells toy boxes that seemingly control the passage of time; an insomniac is seduced by the Sandman. These visions of modern life wrestle with themes of death and technological consequence, guilt and sexuality, as they unmask the contradictions that exist within all of us.
“Fu joins recent maestros Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah (Friday Black, 2018), Charles Yu (Sorry Please Thank You, 2012), and Seong-nan Ha (Bluebeard’s First Wife, 2020) in creating irrefutably fantastic fiction.” – Booklist, starred review
“Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century is one of those rare collections that never suffers from which-one-was-that-again? syndrome. Every story here lights a flame in the memory, shining brighter as time goes by rather than dimming. Kim Fu writes with grace, wit, mischief, daring, and her own deep weird phosphorescent understanding.” – Kevin Brockmeier, author of The Ghost Variations: One Hundred Stories
“When a collection is evocative of authors as disparate as Ray Bradbury and Stephanie Vaughn, the only possible unifier can be originality: and that’s what a reader finds in Kim Fu’s Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century. The strangest of concepts are tempered by grounded, funny dialogue in these stories, which churn with big ideas and craftily controlled antic energy.” – Naben Ruthnum, author of A Hero of Our Time
“How I loved the cool wit of these speculative stories! Filled with wonder and wondering, they’re haunted too by loss and loneliness, their imaginative reach profoundly rooted in the human condition.” – Peter Ho Davies, author of A Lie Someone Told You About Yourself
“Precise, elegant, uncanny, and mesmerizing–each story in this collection is a crystalline gem. Kim Fu’s talent is singularly inventive, her every sentence a surprise and an adventure.” – Danya Kukafka, author of Notes on an Execution
“Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century is for the adventurous reader–someone willing to walk into a story primed for cultural critique and suddenly come across a plot for murder, or to consider the dangers of sea monsters alongside those posed by twenty-first-century ennui. Each story is spectacularly smart, hybrid in genre, and bold with intention. The monsters here are not only fantastical figures brought to life in hyper-reality but also the strangest parts of the human heart. This book is as moving as it is monumental.” – Lucy Tan, author of What We Were Promised
“Kim Fu’s Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century crushes the coal-dark zeitgeist between its teeth and spits out diamonds, beautiful but razor-sharp. This will be one of the best short story collections of the year.” – Indra Das, author of The Devourers
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Light Lifting
$19.95Light Lifting
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Martin John
$19.95Finalist for the 2015 Giller Prize
Among The National Post’s Top 5 Books of 2015
Among The Toronto Star’s Top 5 Fiction Books of 2015
Among Largehearted Boy’s Favourite Novels of 2015
One of Quill & Quire’s Books of the Year, 2015
Among The Edmonton Journal’s Top 5 Books of 2015
A 49th Shelf Book of the Year, 2015
Among NOW Toronto’s Top 10 Books of 2015
Martin John’s mam says that she is glad he is done with it. But is Martin John done with it? He says he wants it to stop, his mother wants it to stop, we all want it to stop. But is it really what Martin John wants? He had it in his mind to do it and he did it. Harm was done when he did it. Harm would continue to be done. Who will stop Martin John? Will you stop him? Should she stop him?
From Anakana Schofield, the brilliant author of the bestselling Malarky, comes a darkly comic novel circuiting through the mind, motivations and preoccupations of a character many women have experienced but few have understood quite so well. The result confirms Schofield as one of the bravest and most innovative authors at work in English today.
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Meagre Tarmac, The
$19.95Meagre Tarmac, The
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Monoceros
$20.95<p><strong>Winner of the W.O. Mitchell Book Prize</strong></p><p><strong>Winner of the 2012 Relit Award for Best Novel<br>Longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize<br>Shortlisted for the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT Fiction<br>Shortlisted for the Alberta Literary Award for Best Fiction<br>A <i>Globe and Mail</i> Best Novel of 2011</strong></p><p>A seventeen-year-old boy, bullied and heartbroken, hangs himself. And although he felt terribly alone, his suicide changes everyone around him.</p><p>His parents are devastated. His secret boyfriend’s girlfriend is relieved. His unicorn- and virginity-obsessed classmate, Faraday, is shattered; she wishes she had made friends with him that time she sold him an Iced Cappuccino at Tim Hortons. His English teacher, mid-divorce and mid-menopause, wishes she could remember the dead student’s name, that she could care more about her students than her ex’s new girlfriend. Who happens to be her cousin. The school guidance counsellor, Walter, feels guilty – maybe he should have made an effort when the kid asked for help. Max, the principal, is worried about how it will reflect on the very Catholic school. And Walter, who’s been secretly in a relationship with Max for years, thinks that’s a little callous. He’s also tired of Max’s obsession with some sci-fi show on TV. And Max wishes Walter would lose some weight and remember to use a coaster.</p><p>And then Max meets a drag queen named Crepe Suzette. And everything changes.</p><p><i>Monoceros</i> is a masterpiece of the tragicomic; by exploring the effects of a suicide on characters outside the immediate circle, Mayr offers a dazzlingly original look at the ripple effects – both poignant and funny – of a tragedy. A tender, bold work.</p>
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Paradise and Elsewhere
$18.95 -
Polar Vortex
$23.00Finalist for the 2020 Scotiabank Giller Prize
Some secrets never die…
Priya and Alexandra have moved from the city to a picturesque countryside town. What Alex doesn’t know is that in moving, Priya is running from her past—from a fraught relationship with an old friend, Prakash, who pursued her for many years, both online and off. Time has passed, however, and Priya, confident that her ties to Prakash have been successfully severed, decides it’s once more safe to establish an online presence. In no time, Prakash discovers Priya online and contacts her. Impulsively, inexplicably, Priya invites him to visit her and Alex in the country, without ever having come clean with Alex about their relationship—or its tumultuous end. Prakash’s sudden arrival at their home reveals cracks in Priya and Alex’s relationship and brings into question Priya’s true intentions.
Seductive and tension-filled, Polar Vortex is a story of secrets, deceptions, and revenge. It asks readers: Are we ever free from our pasts? Do we deserve to be?
2020 Scotiabank Giller Prize Jury Citation:
“A keen meditation on the complexities of identity and desire, Polar Vortex is the unsettling examination of a failing marriage. In a small, southern Ontario town, Priya impulsively invites an old suitor, Prakash, to spend the night and his arrival triggers the fault lines in her relationship with Alexandra. Conflicting wants and untold truths drag the past into the present. Memories cascade and clash as Mootoo masterfully dismantles the stories the narrators tell themselves in language as unsparing as winter.”
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Solitaria
$19.95When Vito Santoro’s body is inadvertently unearthed by a demolition crew in Fregene, Italy, his siblings are thrown into turmoil, having been told by their sister Piera that Vito had fled to Argentina fifty years earlier after abandoning his wife and son. Piera, the self-proclaimed matriarch, locks herself in her room, refusing to speak to anyone but her Canadian nephew, David. Now scattered over three continents, the family members regroup in Italy to try to discover the truth.
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Songs For The Cold Of Heart
$29.95Nuns that appear out of thin air, a dinner party at the Goebbels’, Quebec’s very own Margaret Thatcher, a grandma that just won’t die (not until the archangel comes back)…Songs For The Cold Of Heart is a yarn to rival the best of them, a big fat whopper of a tall tale that bounces around from provincial Rivière-du-Loup in 1919 to Nagasaki, 1990s Berlin, Rome, and beyond. This is the novel of a century?long and glorious, stuffed full of parallels, repeating motifs, and unforgettable characters?with the passion and plotting of a modern-day Tosca.
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Stolen
$20.00Rowan Friesen has made a career of drug dealing and small-time thievery. He lives a loners life on the outer reaches of Saskatoon, selling cystal meth to highschoolers and hawking his pilfered loot on the net. Shiftless and seemingly friendless, he is, at first glance, an unlikely and unlikable protagonist.
But as Stolen unfolds, we learn the details of Rowans life: his well-meaning but self-absorbed mother, his mentally ill father, and a high school friendship both lustful and incendiary.
Praise for Stolen:
Lapointe constructs the familiar world, the one inside each of us, in the lives of strangers. Its what fiction does best. The Globe & Mail
It moves with the force of whats right and true and must not be elided. Giller Prize Jury
Giller Prize Nominee
Winner, Saskatchewan Book Awards
Best First Book (City of Saskatoon Book Award)
Globe & Mail Top 5 First Fiction