Top 10: Winners in Our Books

It’s peak book award season, and between the Giller Prize, Governor General’s Awards, Writers’ Trust Awards, we thought it was high time to hand out some awards of our own: books from this year we think may have been looked over by the juries (no blame to juries: they have to pick just a handful of books, and we do not envy them their sisyphean task). Check out the Top 10 Winners in our Books (of which choosing was our own literary Everest, sweet Christmas, hug your juries).* * *10. Cordelia Strube’s On the Shores of Darkness, There is Light (ECW Press) is obviously up here. While it (deservedly) won this year’s Toronto Book Award, we feel more gilded attention could be given to a book that alternately made us howl with laughter and punched us in the heart.

9. The autofictional Testament by Vickie Gendreau (BookThug) might be excluded from the major fiction prizes because of its genre-bending style, but LitDistCo GM Natasha said of it that: “it has a bit of everything I like in a book: hard-hitting topics (cancer, brain injury, death), wonderful prose (can’t stop thinking, “I close my eyes, I open my eyes,” a line throughout the book), and interesting characters/people.”8. Our August Book Club pick was A Gentle Habit by Cherie Dimaline (Kegedonce Press), and we all revelled in Dimaline’s mighty powers of description. If you missed it in August, maybe now’s the time to check out her collection?

7. Kevin A. Couture’s Lost Animal Club (NeWest Press) deserves not only heaps of awards for his whip-smart debut collection concerning people and their relationships with and to animals, but also for its brilliant cover design, featuring the designer’s cat Winn.6. We can almost see the SkyDome/Rogers Centre from ALU HQ, and Andrew Forbes’ The Utility of Boredom (Invisible Books) kept the baseball feverish among us sated when things were too busy to make it out to the field.

5. Lydia Perovic’s All that Sang (Véhicule Press) is short – it clocks in at just 138 pages – but unbelievably, poignantly sweet. Her story of a Canadian opera critic falling in love with the French composer she’s been sent to interview interchangeably (and beautifully) explores lust, music, and longing.4. Poet Elizabeth Philips’ novel, The Afterlife of Birds (Freehand Books), is unabashedly quirky – it spends most of its first chapter talking about penis bones (they’re a thing) – but deeply heartfelt. This book was nominated for the Amazon First Novel Award, but we wanted to give our own awardly nod of approval.3. We’d also like to shine our awards light on another poet-cum-novelist, Arleen Paré, and her novel Leaving Now (Caitlin Press), about a woman who leaves her family to live with her lover. Her visitations from Gudru, the forgotten mother from Hansel and Gretel, are what clinched this story in our hearts.2. If we could give awards to our blog posts, we’d have to give one to Vivek Shraya’s no-nonsense #PublishingSoWhite piece, where she gave us 13 actionable steps to diversify publishing houses. Likewise, we fete her debut collection of poetry even this page is white (Arsenal Pulp Press), a fearless interrogation of modern racism.1. We’ve always been fans of Newfoundland-based writer Chad Pelley, and his latest short story collection Four-Letter Words (Breakwater Books) splits his signature devastating character twists into these stories, all inspired by the four-letter words that drive us (love, hate, lust, loss).

* * *Oof, narrowing down to those 10 was hard, and all of our “Top 50” bargaining was for naught. Keep an eye on All Lit Up for more Award-related things next week, like our inevitable Lit Awards Hangover.