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SCOTIABANK GILLER SHORT & LONGLISTS

How to Pronounce Knife: Stories

By Souvankham Thammavongsa

In the store

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

In the store

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

In the store

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

In the store

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

In the store

MADE THE SHORTLIST! Both fascinating and prophetic.

All I Ask

By Eva Crocker

In the store

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

In the store

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

In the store

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

In the store

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

In the store

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

In the store

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

In the store

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

In the store

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

In the store

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

In the store

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

In the store

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

In the store

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

In the store

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

In the store

What underpins this fantastic novel is scrupulous attention to detail!

The Dutch House: A Novel

By Ann Patchett

In the store

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

REVIEW: HOMELAND ELEGIES

Review By Brian Ostrow

Date: 4 Oct 2020

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Homeland Elegies: A Novel

Homeland Elegies is a funny, illuminating and courageous book. Through a combination of memoir, fiction (all the details seemed plausible to me) and rumination, Akhtar, a Pulitzer Prize winning playwright and the author of American Dervish, dissects our collective, current North American moment, with its anger, frustration and cognitive dissonance. He achieves this through recounting episodes of his own life; that of an American son of Punjabi immigrant parents from newly carved out Pakistan.

Of course this story starts as it must, like our obsessions, with Trump. Akhtar’s father is a great booster for his new American life and its seemingly endless possibilities. He is a well-known cardiologist, an expert in arrhythmias. In the course of events, in the 1990s, he meets Donald J Trump as a patient, suffering from heart palpitations. He is flown to New York and housed in the Plaza. After confirming the benign nature of Trump’s ailment, the doctor becomes enamoured of Trump with whom he shares various behaviours – impulsive, sketchy investments leading to bankruptcy; even a fondness for certain high-end sex workers. And so, as 2016 approaches, the father and his increasingly incredulous son debate the merits of voting for Trump, with his crass misogyny, racism and utter mendacity.

Structured as a picaresque, through meetings with various characters from Akhtar’s life, the book cogently reveals the evolving nature of American society in its late capitalist phase. At the centre lies 9/11 and its ambiguous features for American Muslims subjected to the recurring suspicions and hostilities of other Americans. But the book also has much to say about how the increasing concentration of capital, with its relentless march towards globalization, hollows out the possibilities of locality, the middle class, transforming citizens into mere consumers and impoverishing them in the process. Here we come again to Trump, now seen as the reflection, even voice, of this disenfranchising system and the anger, racism and xenophobia that it engenders.

Finally, as all good stories must, this one ends with family, especially father and son. Beneath their conflict lies an irrational love and a differing solution to discovering what is home.

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