Dec 8

Written by: Joe Longo
Monday, December 08, 2008 

Public libraries promote Canadian award-winning books at this time of the year. Many have been recently recognized in the past few weeks. See the Online Research Tools on our library website www.nflibrary.ca to find other great books and reviews in such databases as Novelist and Literature Resource Centre and borrow the following great reads.

Joseph Boyden won the Scotiabank Giller Prize for his novel Through Black Spruce, “an astonishingly powerful novel of contemporary aboriginal life, full of the dangers and harsh beauty of both forest and city”.

The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill is the winning title of the Evergreen Award. Author Lawrence Hill will be presented with the award at the 2009 Ontario Library Association Super Conference. The shortlist consisted of ten books selected by a committee of librarians.

The novel follows the story of Aminata Diallo, as she is kidnapped from her village in Africa and put to work in a slave plantation in South Carolina, to her journey back to Africa through Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone.

The 2008 Governor General’s Literary Awards for fiction recognized Nino Ricci for The Origin of Species which “ takes us into the now distant world of the post-Trudeau 1980s. Set mostly in Montreal, with an illuminating voyage to the Galápagos at its centre, this exquisite novel is both tough and tender and, in the end, confirms our belief in the resilience of the human heart.”

The 2008 Governor General’s Literary Awards for non- fiction recognized Christie Blatchford for Fifteen Days: Stories of Bravery, Friendship, Life and Death from Inside the New Canadian Army. “This illuminating book ensures the soldiers serving and dying in Afghanistan are not reduced to mere numbers in the war of words that attends the most debated deployment in modern Canadian history.”

Borrow other finalists in this year’s Governor General Awards. These include the novels “Atmospheric Disturbances” by Rivka Galchen, “Cockroach” by Rawi Hage, “The Lost Highway” by David Adams Richards and “The Great Karoo” by Fred Stenson.

Non-fiction finalists included “The Black Grizzly of Whiskey Creek” by Sid Marty, “An Imperfect Offering: Humanitarian Action in the Twenty-first Century” by James Orbinski, and Chris Turner’s “Calgary, The Geography of Hope: A Tour of the World We Need”.