On October 9, the Giller Prize 2024 shortlist was announced. Covering this award has become an annual tradition for me. 🙂 I am excited to highlight this year’s finalists. Let’s see which books made the list this year and why the jury chose them.
Giller Prize 2024 Finalists
What I Know About You by Éric Chacour
Historical Fiction, Translated | Goodreads
A heartbreaking tale of a family and an impossible love, twisted apart by secrets and traditions in late-20th-century Cairo.
In a tight-knit Levantine Christian family in 1960s Cairo, Tarek’s entire life is written in advance. He’ll be a doctor like his father, marry, and have children. Under the watchful eye of the family’s strong women, he starts to do just that – until a patient’s son, Ali, enters his life and turns it upside down. The two men’s unsayable relationship sparks a series of events as dramatic as the Six-Day War and assassination of President Anwar Sadat playing out in the background.
The turn of the millennium finds Tarek living as a doctor in Montreal. Someone is writing about him and to him, piecing together a past he wants only to forget. But who is the writer of this tale? And will Tarek figure it out in time?
From Cairo’s grand boulevards and hidden alleys to Montreal’s grim winter, from the reign of Nasser to the early 2000s, What I Know About You tells the heartbreaking story of a family
“One man’s love for another breaches the norms of gender, society and class in the otherwise modernizing, secular Egypt of Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat. Tarek, a doctor, nurtures a love that comes to him unexpectedly and neither his country, nor his family is able to accept. Elegantly told and profoundly affecting, What I Know About You speaks to the inherited moral structures constraining us, and to the alienation of a man’s inner life rendered external. Tarek leaves Cairo and his marriage for Montreal, a cold and foreign city in which his otherness is of a more ordinary kind but, when circumstances finally permit, returns to confront the past and its consequences nebulously in pursuit of him. Here is a quiet, touching story in which the acts of yearning, stymied hearts transcend their troubled genesis and move their hosts towards the possibility of redemption that is love’s essence.”
Why the jury chose this book
Curiosities by Anne Fleming
Historical Fiction | Goodreads
A thrilling literary-historical novel with a modern twist, in the vein of Fingersmith by Sarah Waters and Fayne by Ann-Marie MacDonald.
Curiosities opens with a present-day amateur historian, Anne, who describes her unexpected discovery of five seventeenth-century manuscripts that, astonishingly, tell the same strange story from vastly different points of view. The five manuscripts spin this after the Plague descends upon a village in England, two small children, Joan and Thomasina, are the only survivors. They bond tightly with each other and with a woman living in the forest nearby, who discovers and cares for them. When people return, the woman, as the lone adult alive, is accused of witchcraft, and the children are separated. Joan is taken on as a maid in the local manor house, and through her intelligence and skill becomes a companion to the fascinating Lady Margaret Long. Thomasina, sent on a sea voyage to Virginia, adopts boy’s clothing and navigates life as a man named Tom.
Tom and Joan find each other as adults and fall in love, but are discovered together, naked, by a young clergyman. Shocked and horrified, he believes there is but one explanation for Tom’s Joan must be a witch. Desperate to save both himself and Joan, Tom runs as far away as he can, to the North Pole. And so it falls upon Anne, the contemporary historian, to piece together these interlocking stories, discover the fate of the lovers, and add her own layer of “truth” to a history and time period when there were no labels for who Tom and Joan might truly be.
“Anne Fleming’s Curiosities begins in 17th century England beset by the plague and rife with superstition and fear. A series of archived memoirs that the amateur historian Anne is researching provide a puzzle and the means by which this thrillingly inventive novel immerses us in the historic and illuminates the contemporary. Joan, the only one of her family to survive “the sicknesse,” takes up with another child, Thomasina, alone and nursed by a goat. They find allies where they can, notably “Old Nut,” an ostracized woman who is imprisoned, tried and executed because she is thought to be a witch, as Joan is later assumed to be, before their paths, perilous and radically different, diverge. “Tom,” disguised as a boy, joins the crew of a ship sailing through Hudson’s Bay, while Lady Margaret Long, a naturalist and thoroughly modern woman, takes Joan underwing. Singular and surprising, Curiosities is a captivating story of hope, change, and belonging, and first and foremost a testament to varieties of love that endure beyond any one history or era.”
Why the jury chose this book
Prairie Edge by Conor Kerr
Mystery | Goodreads
The Giller Prize-longlisted author of Avenue of Champions returns with a frenetic, propulsive crime thriller that doubles as a sharp critique of modern activism and challenges readers to consider what “Land Back” might really look like.
Meet Isidore “Ezzy” Desjarlais and Grey two distant Métis cousins making the most of Grey’s uncle’s old trailer, passing their days playing endless games of cribbage and cracking cans of cheap beer in between. Grey, once a passionate advocate for change, has been hardened and turned cynical by an activist culture she thinks has turned performative and lazy. One night, though, she has a revelation, and enlists Ezzy, who is hopelessly devoted to her but eager to avoid the authorities after a life in and out of the group home system and jail, for a bold yet dangerous political capture a herd of bison from a national park and set them free in downtown Edmonton, disrupting the churn of settler routine. But as Grey becomes increasingly single-minded in her new
“Conor Kerr’s Prairie Edge is both a propulsive crime narrative built around successive, compounding blunders and a work of literary art that tells us about what it means to live in a world where action and rhetoric around decolonization fail to align. Its two main characters, an idealistic, would-be academic and an endearingly naive ex-con, both Métis, hatch a quixotic plan to re-home bison from national parks to downtown Edmonton, where they once ran free, as a bold statement against the settler status quo. Kerr extracts maximum amounts of comedy and pathos from the novel’s premise while populating this fictional world with resonant characters whose difficult experiences with group homes, social services, and activist circles are softened by enduring family bonds and friendships. Kerr entertains us with a contemporary caper while inviting readers to consider a future that has reckoned with the past.”
Why the jury chose this book
Held by Anne Michaels
Historical Fiction | Goodreads
A breathtaking and mysterious new novel from the beloved Anne Michaels, internationally bestselling author of Fugitive Pieces and The Winter Vault.
1917. On a battlefield near the River Aisne, 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—a chance encounter in a pub by a railway, a hot bath with his lover on a winter night, his childhood on a faraway coast—as the snow falls.
1920. John has returned from war to North Yorkshire, near another river—alive, but not whole. Reunited with Helena, an artist, he reopens his photography business and endeavours to keep on living. But the past erupts insistently into the present, as ghosts begin to surface in his ghosts whose messages he cannot understand .
So begins a narrative that spans four generations, moments of connection and consequence igniting and re-igniting as the century unfolds. In luminous moments of desire, comprehension, longing, and transcendence, the sparks fly upward, working their transformations decades later. This resonance through time—not only of actions but also of feelings and perceptions—desire in its many forms—are at the heart of this novel’s profound investigation.
Held is a deeply affecting and intensely beautiful novel, full of unforgettable characters and imagery, wisdom and compassion. It explores the deepest mysteries, and the ways in which desire in its many forms—and perhaps the deepest desire, to find meaning—manifests itself. Held moves through history to light upon Darwin, Sir Ernest Rutherford, North Sea ganseys, early photography, Ella Mary Leather, modern field hospitals…while lovers find each other and snow drifts down across the centuries. From the WW1 battlefield where the novel begins, and its opening lines, Held is alive with “We know life is finite. Why should we believe death lasts forever?”
“Anne Michaels’ Held is a novel that floats, a beguiling association of memories, projections, and haunted instances through which the very notion of our mortality, of our resilience and desires, is interrogated in passages as impactful as they can be hypnotic. Ostensibly Held begins with a man, John, lying injured on a First World War battlefield who returns, broken, to the woman he loves and his Yorkshire photography studio, where ghostly figures emerge from the shadows of the photographs he develops—the sorts of “images that can, like certain rhythms, dismantle us.” In a story of querulous fragments refuting a novel’s usual form, Michaels conveys war’s legacy of harm and trauma reverberating across generations, but through them all our irrefutable connectedness. Michaels’ mastery of word and situations is understated but insistent, an altogether successful reliance that deflects attention from its author and embeds the reader in the resoundingly mysterious and ephemeral. Here is a novel in which we are willingly held.”
Why the jury chose this book
Peacocks of Instagram: Stories by Deepa Rajagopalan
Short stories, Realistic Fiction | Goodreads
Peacocks of Instagram is a fresh and intimate debut collection of short stories suffused with the dilemmas, heartbreaks, and joys of diasporic Indians. In these brilliant and witty stories, Deepa Rajagopalan centres a cast of Indian women who are flawed, enterprising, and filled with desire. In the award-winning title story, an underappreciated server in a coffee shop attracts tens of thousands of followers on social media with her peacock accessories. A hotel housekeeper up against a world of gender and class inequality quietly gets revenge on her chauvinist boss. A young woman navigates the landscape of loneliness after abruptly leaving her home in India by learning to drive over it. An eight-year-old finds her entire life uprooted when her mother needs a new kidney. A fiercely independent engineer does not decamp to the sidelines of an affair but takes up space, living her life as variously as possible. Peacocks of Instagram deftly questions what it means to be safe, to survive, and to call a place home.
“An utterly absorbing, often hilarious story collection, Deepa Rajagopalan’s Peacocks of Instagram reimagines the literature of the Indian diaspora in the age of globe-trotting IT workers, climate change, and social media influencers. A divorced woman channels her grief over the demise of her marriage into a bestselling line of ceramics. A factory owner in Johannesburg learns about the “secret” life led by his sometimes girlfriend in Toronto at her funeral. A young woman takes revenge on her oil lobbyist foster dad. Written in mature, perfectly rounded prose embroidered with telling detail and pithy dialogue, the loosely linked stories of this arresting debut collection follow an array of appealing characters who not only withstand heartbreak and misunderstanding but occasionally triumph over it by dint of their wit and cunning. In their discovery of themselves and their capabilities, Rajagopalan’s stories continually surprise.”
Why the jury chose this book
About Giller Prize
The Giller Prize, founded by Jack Rabinovitch in 1994, highlights the very best in Canadian fiction year after year. In 2005, the prize teamed up with Scotiabank who increased the winnings 4-fold. The Scotiabank Giller Prize now awards $100,000 annually to the author of the best Canadian novel, graphic novel or short story collection published in English, and $10,000 to each of the finalists. The award is named in honour of the late literary journalist Doris Giller by her husband Toronto businessman Jack Rabinovitch, who passed away in August 2017. The Giller Prize is sponsored by Scotiabank, CBC Books, Mantella Corporation, Indigo, and the Azrieli Foundation.
This year’s jury is made up of Canadian authors Kevin Chong and Noah Richler (jury chair), and Canadian singer-songwriter Molly Johnson.
The longlist consisted of 12 titles of the 112 submitted.
The winner of Giller Prize 2024 will be announced on November 18.Â
Have you read any of the books above or plan to? Tell me in the comments. I am looking forward to reading Prairie Edge. If you want to read any of the books on this list, let me know. I would love to discuss together!
Would you like to see any other awards highlighted on the blog?
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