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SCOTIABANK GILLER SHORT & LONGLISTS

How to Pronounce Knife: Stories

By Souvankham Thammavongsa

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Congratulations to Souvankham Thammavongsa for winning this year's Scotia Giller Prize!! These poignant and deceptively quiet stories are powerhouses of feeling and depth; How to Pronounce Knife is an artful blend of simplicity and sophistication.

Here the Dark

By David Bergen

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MADE THE SHORTLIST! Several short stories and an extraordinary novella makes Giller Prize Winner David Bergen's newest book unforgettable.

Polar Vortex

By Shani Mootoo

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MADE THE SHORTLIST! 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...

Ridgerunner

By Gil Adamson

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Just won the Roger's Trust Fiction Prize - Ridgerunner is part literary Western and part historical mystery, and a follow-up to Gil Adamson's award-winning and critically acclaimed novel The Outlander.

The Glass Hotel: A Novel

By Emily St. John Mandel

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MADE THE SHORTLIST! Both fascinating and prophetic.

All I Ask

By Eva Crocker

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Like Sally Rooney's Conversations with Friends and Eileen Myles's Chelsea Girls, All I Ask by the award-winning and highly acclaimed author Eva Crocker is a defining novel of a generation.

Indians on Vacation: A Novel

By Thomas King

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WE HAVE AUTOGRAPHED COPIES!!! Nominated for the Rogers Trust Fiction Prize, you're sure to enjoy Tom's latest book, inspired by a handful of old postcards sent by Uncle Leroy nearly a hundred years ago. Any book by Tom is always a reason to celebrate!!!

The Pull of the Stars: A Novel

By Emma Donoghue

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Pull of the Stars is a meticulously researched and timely novel! Dublin, 1918: three days in a maternity ward at the height of the Great Flu. A small world of work, risk, death and unlooked-for love largely rendered.

Dominoes at the Crossroads: Short Stories

By Kaie Kellough

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In Dominoes at the Crossroads Kaie Kellough maps an alternate nation--one populated by Caribbean Canadians who hopscotch across the country.

Five Little Indians: A Novel

By Michelle Good

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Taken from their families when they are very small and sent to a remote, church-run residential school, Kenny, Lucy, Clara, Howie and Maisie are barely out of childhood when they are finally released after years of detention.

Consent

By Annabel Lyon

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A smart, mysterious and heartbreaking novel centred on two sets of sisters whose lives are braided together when tragedy changes them forever.

Clyde Fans

By Seth

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Congratulations to Guelph's own sweet Seth on this first nomination of a graphic novel for the Giller longlist.

Watching You Without Me

By Lynn Coady

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After her mother's sudden death, Karen finds herself back in her childhood home in Nova Scotia for the first time in a decade, acting as full-time caregiver to Kelli, her older sister.

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YOU CAN'T GO WRONG WITH THESE NOVELS!

Normal People

By Sally Rooney

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BARB - Normal People won last year's Man Booker and also was the bestselling book in Britain. It's all well deserved as she understands the zeitgeist of the young, no matter what age they grew up in!

The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse

By Charlie Mackesy

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From the revered British illustrator, a modern fable for all ages that explores life's universal lessons, featuring 100 color and black-and-white drawings."What do you want to be when you grow up?" asked the mole."Kind," said the boy."

The Innocents

By Michael Crummey

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Beautiful but dark. The language is biblical and captures and awakens you to the trials of living. A brother and sister are orphaned in an isolated cove on Newfoundland's northern coastline. Their home is a stretch of rocky shore governed by the feral ocean, by a relentless pendulum of abundance and murderous scarcity. Very powerful writing!

The Testaments: A Novel

By Margaret Atwood

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Let's sing a hymn of praise to Margaret Atwood and all of the important work that she continues to do! Co-winner of the Mann Booker Prize this year!

Station Eleven

By Emily St John Mandel

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An audacious, darkly glittering novel about art, fame and ambition set in the eerie days of civilization's collapse. Kind of flying off the shelf right now!

A Gentleman in Moscow: A Novel

By Amor Towles

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What underpins this fantastic novel is scrupulous attention to detail!

The Dutch House: A Novel

By Ann Patchett

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Ann Patchett, the New York Times bestselling author of Commonwealth and State of Wonder, returns with her most powerful novel to date: a richly moving story that explores the indelible bond between two siblings, the house of their childhood, and a past that will not let them go.

Literary

INTRO TO GRAPHIC MEMOIRS

Article By Dylan White

Date: 8 Jun 2020

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Related...

The Arab of the Future: A Childhood in the Middle East, 1978-1984: A Graphic Memoir
Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City
Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood

We can always stand to benefit from becoming more informed citizens of the very culturally and politically varied world that we inhabit. Similarly, we stand to benefit enormously by immersing ourselves in new art forms, literature, and more, to continually expand our horizons and encounter the unknown, coming to appreciate difference and the unfamiliar, and the aspects of familiarity that exists within those differences as well. A work that can do both of these things simultaneously is a very special thing, indeed.

These three graphic memoirs from Riad Sattouf, Marjane Satrapi, and Guy Delisle, do just that. Connected, however loosely, both geographically and thematically, these three great works of the burgeoning, though arguably still underappreciated genre of graphic memoir, are historically and politically rich, artistically engaging, as well as extremely personal and enlightening accounts of the Middle East. From Sattouf’s confused early years in Librya and Syria, to Satrapi’s rebellious adolescence in Iran, and Delisle’s expat explorations of Jerusalem, a place that means so much to so many, these works provide the reader with an opportunity to experience a visually striking and engaging account of people and places that many of us may not have access to otherwise, or at least not in the way presented here.

For those looking for an introduction to the graphic memoir genre, to the history and politics of the Middle East, or simply to a beautiful and engaging work of autobiography, these three books are highly recommended.

 

The Arab of the Future: A Childhood in the Middle East, 1978-1984 by Riad Sattouf

Recounting his childhood growing up in France, Libya, and Syria in the 70s and 80s, Riad Sattouf’s graphic memoir offers an enthralling glimpse into not only the experience of one child navigating the difficulties of growing up in a world, and family, in crisis, but a historically rich account of the Middle East as well. Darkly funny, tragic, and wonderfully illustrated, the first in this series of four is sure to be an engaging and rewarding read for fans of the graphic memoir genre, as well as those seeking to branch out and explore a new world of fascinating literature.

 

Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi

A classic of the genre, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis combines political history and memoir to capture aspects of the Islamic Revolution not to be found in the history books. Through stark, yet beautiful, black-and-white drawing and compelling storytelling, Satrapi explore the often-contradictory nature of private and public life, as well as the feeling of grappling with a love and hate of the place you are from; feelings that many of us are more than familiar with. Readers are likely to find Satrapi’s account of childhood and adolescence both foreign and reminiscent, as well as heartwarming and, at times, heartbreaking.

 

Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City by Guy Delisle

The absurd and the tragic are very closely related throughout Guy Delisle’s excellent travelogue and memoir Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City. Living for a year with his family in Jerusalem, Delisle’s wry observations and commentary of a land wrought with political peril and uncertainty offers the reader a new way understanding the troubled history and religious significance of the Holy City. The complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are often truly difficult to understand, but Delisle’s book renders these complexities comprehendible in a way I’ve not encountered before. Delisle, while clearly immersed in the day-to-day life of the Holy City, seems to somehow simultaneously reside outside or above the place he inhabits, providing a largely unbiased account of both sides of the conflict, the absurdities and tragedies of both, as well as the mundane that exists alongside the sacred. Though much has occurred since the publication of Delisle’s book, this work remains invaluable in its engaging and enlightening account the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and of the city of Jerusalem.

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