Winner of the 2013 Fiction Award:

Harriet Richards: The Pious Robber
Publisher's description: In the brilliantly imagined title story two young girls become guardian angels to an emaciated drifter with a very dark secret. Their innocence is an armour against the danger that simmers, below adult knowledge, around a northern lake. Innocence, both tough and vulnerable, is at play in many of these stories: Ava, in “A Great Wrong” carries the guilt of a childhood betrayal and revenge; Olivia’s role as confidante, in “Bagatelle”, channels the absurdities and fragility of clumsy, hopeful lives. “In the Direction of the Three Sisters” is a sad, ironic protest at life’s unfairness.
Trust is the most perilous adventure in Richards’ stories, but every one of her characters takes that risk. Their candour in the face of what follows is the book’s enduring delight.

* * *

Winner of the First Book Award and the Regina Book Award:

Melanie Schnell: While the Sun is Above Us
Summary: In the midst of the bloody civil war in Sudan, Adut is brutally captured and held as a slave for eight years. Sandra, fleeing her life in Canada, travels to South Sudan as an aid worker but soon finds herself unwittingly embroiled in a violent local conflict. When chance brings Adut and Sandra together in a brief but profound moment, their lives change forever.

To see the list of all winners and nominees, go to the All Time Award Nominees List by Year posted by the Saskatchewan Book Awards.

Here is a selection from the Publisher's Weekly list
Best Books of 2012 Fiction.
For the full list, including reviews go to this link.

Pure
Andrew Miller (Europa)

In his Costa Prize–winning novel, Miller has fun with the history of Les Innocents, a cemetery fouling the center of Paris. The book begins on the eve of the French Revolution as Jean-Baptiste Baratte, an ambitious engineer, is hired to get rid of the site casting a deathly pall over the city. "The place is to be made sweet again," says a minister, with the dead disposed of, down to the "last knucklebone."

Dear Life
Alice Munro (Knopf)
Munro depicts key moments without obscuring the reality of a life filled with countless other moments, told and untold. In her 13th story collection she again charts the shifts in norms after WWII. What's different is that Munro writes explicitly about her childhood. Read together, these stories speak to each other, accrete, and deepen.

The Coldest Night
Robert Olmstead (Algonquin)
Olmstead's harrowing story of young Henry Childs's escape from love into war is poetic and brutal. "The men did not look human after war's subtraction: no eye, no ear, no nose, no face, no arm, no leg, no gut, no bowel, no bone, no spine, no muscle, no nerve, no breath, no heart, no brain, no faith." Olmstead powerfully evokes the hell of the Korean War on a man who thinks he has something to return to.

The Yellow Birds
Kevin Powers (Little, Brown)
The war in Iraq through the eyes of a poet; the author an Iraqi veteran and a poet both, who's taken his experiences and his gifts to write a novel of friendship, loss, and the price of battle.
.
.

The Cove
Ron Rash (Ecco)
A mute stranger with a dangerous secret who's on his way to New York is rescued by the lonely "witch" of the haunted cove of the title in the Appalachian mountains of North Carolina during WWI in this atmospheric gothic tale.
.
.

The Age of Miracles
Karen Thompson Walker (Random)
In this debut novel from a Columbia M.F.A.-graduate and former Simon & Schuster editor, the 11-year-old protagonist's blooming awareness of a boy is treated with as much respect as the end of the world. Walker has a surgeon's skill at ratcheting tension, parceling out in tiny portions the full impact of "the slowing" of the earth's rotation on the planet's unfortunate inhabitants. A triumph of vision and terrifying momentum.

See the entire list here.

The 2012 CBC Canada Reads page

This session of Canada Reads divided the country into five regions.
The Top Ten in the Prairies and the North Region have been winnowed down to The Top Five.

Update November 13 - the top five appear at the top of the list, with a star by the title:

* The Age of Hope by David Bergen

* The Diviners by Margaret Laurence

* The Garneau Block by Todd Babiak

* Late Nights on Air by Elizabeth Hay

* The Trade by Fred Stenson

Who Has Seen the Wind by W.O. Mitchell

Cool Water by Dianne Warren

Fall from Grace by Wayne Arthurson

Stolen by Annette Lapointe

The Englishman's Boy by Guy Vanderhaeghe

Alexander Macleod: Light Lifting

This book of short stories is worth a look. Here's what Quill & Quire had to say:

Light Lifting is one of those rare debuts: a breathtakingly good collection of short fiction that heralds the arrival of a significant new talent. It’s also the sort of book one worries won’t get the attention it deserves.

The seven stories each encompass a keenly observed, immersive world, and each carries the weight and impact of a novel. They are reminiscent of the work of Alice Munro at her best: rich and deep, merciless and utterly unflinching. . . .
Read the entire review here.

* * *
Want more short story collections? Try Alistair Macleod's books (Alistair is Alexander's father):
The Lost Salt Gift of Blood
As Birds Bring Forth the Sun and other stories
Island

or type the key words "short stories Canadian" or "short stories women", etc. into the SILS catalogue.
Sort your list by date to see the most recent books first.

Saskatchewan Book Awards winners were announced on April 28

For the full list of winners, go to the link above:

Fiction Award:

* Harold Johnson,: The Cast Stone
Summary: A dystopian novel in which a First Nations professor confronts and assesses the impact of the US annexation of Canada through an examination of personal values and First Nations social mores.
.
.
.
.
.
First Book Award:

* Anne McDonald: To The Edge Of The Sea
Summary: Alex was in harmony with the water. He taught himself to swim and liked working the sea but always yearned for something more. His brother Reggie despised it all and yearned to escape. Mercy Coles lived in high society and yearned for new experiences. All three would get their wish, but coincidence would shape those wishes in profound ways. Alex finds himself on a circus trapeze. Reggie joins the farmer's protests against tax collectors and battles his own personal demons. Mercy finds herself in the middle of the battle for Canadian confederation with hard-drinking politician John A. MacDonald.

.
.

What is left the daughter by Howard A. Norman

Here's what Booklist had to say: /* Starred Review */ A victim of unrequited love, Wyatt Hillyer has lived a half-life. Now that his daughter, whom he does not know, is turning 21, he is determined to give her the only bequest he can, his story. And what a staggering tale of cruel coincidences it is. Norman continues his bewitching Canadian cycle of novels (The Bird Artist, The Museum Guard, The Haunting of L) shaped by mysterious confluences and devastating loss, unsought premonitions and messages from the dead. Like The Museum Guard, this haunting saga takes place in Nova Scotia during WWII.

Wyatt’s descent into sorrow begins with his parents’ scandalous deaths. Given shelter by his practical and wise Aunt Constance and gruff Uncle Donald, teenage Wyatt falls hopelessly in love with their book-struck adopted daughter, Tilda, who unnerves everyone by becoming a professional mourner and marrying a German exchange student while German U-boats prowl the coast. An operatic sequence of bloody tragedies ensues, leaving Wyatt soul-battered and penitential. Norman’s piquant insights into life’s wildness, human eccentricity, and love’s maddening persistence are matched by rhapsodic and profound descriptions of everything from perfectly baked scones to pelting rain and the devouring sea, while anguish is tempered with humor, thanks to rapid-fire banter and marvelously spiky characters.

* * *
Read-alikes suggested by NoveList:

The final solution
Chabon, Michael

Captain Corelli's mandolin
De Bernieres, Louis

The sealed letter
Donoghue, Emma

To see the complete list of the Globe & Mail's 100 Best Books of 2011, follow this link.

For the Globe & Mail's Top Crime Fiction of 2011, go to this post on the Mystery Fiction blog Murder by the Book :
Margaret Cannon's Best 11 from 2011

The Globe & Mail's Fiction List is divided into Canadian Fiction and Foreign Fiction (includes the U.S.).
Here are some examples from both categories:

Canadian Fiction

The Perfect Order of Things By David Gilmour

Gilmour’s delicious, subversive, self-mocking novel features a narrator who is a composite from all his other books. He revisits the places he has suffered, hoping to balance old scores and relearn early lessons. In the process, he is transformed from a man who likes to watch his own reflection into a man who reflects on his failings and losses. – Aritha van Herk

* * *

A Good Man By Guy Vanderhaeghe

This deeply satisfying novel, dealing with ethics, politics and nationhood, is more entertaining than political historical novels have any business being. It is the kind of impeccably crafted, Dickensian charmer we expect from Vanderhaeghe's now completed “literary western” trilogy, a collection of thematically connected fictions about the death of the wild in the Wild West. – Andrew Pyper

* * *

The Little Shadows By Marina Endicott

Featuring three fatherless sisters and their widowed mother, The Little Shadows is set on vaudeville stages all over the U.S. and Canadian West around the First World War. The novel features Endicott’s trademark wry sensibility and pithy lyricism, and her skill at pulling the rug out from under the reader’s feet. – Katherine Ashenburg

* * *

Infrared By Nancy Huston

Rena, a 45-year-old photographer in Paris, visits Florence with her elderly father and her stepmother, even though she can’t bear to be away from her lover and resents her stepmother. We come to see that her relationship with her father is problematic too. Huston shows her mastery of complicated structure, wide cultural knowledge and brilliant, assured portraiture. – Michel Basilières

* * *

The Time We All Went Marching By Arley McNeney

This small, beautiful book is filled with large themes. Edie and her four-year-old son, Belly, have boarded a train to B.C., leaving Belly’s father passed out in their freezing apartment. On the train, Edie tells Slim’s stories of Depression-era marches to Belly. McNeney layers these stories on Edie’s story with great care. A stunning achievement. – Michelle Berry

* * * * *

Foreign Fiction (includes the U.S.)

Disaster was My God: A Novel of the Outlaw Life of Arthur Rimbaud by Bruce Duffy

Rimbaud was a 19th-century prodigy who booted poetry into the 20th century before refashioning himself as an arms dealer in Africa. This “teenaged pied piper” lured Paul Verlaine – here a depraved creature Duffy captures in all his spellbinding loathsomeness – over the cliff of propriety, sobriety and solvency. A wonderful story, with a vitality that can’t be suppressed. – Kathleen Byrne

* * *

The Grief of Others By Leah Hager Cohen

Cohen’s deeply affecting novel begins with a woman in a maternity ward, struggling to come to grips with the death of her baby, who lived for only 52 hours. A year later, the family is still reeling. This is a complex and resonant novel, a moving exploration of the ways grief can twist and maim us. – Steven Hayward

* * *

The Emperor of Lies By Steve Sem-Sandberg

This brilliantly constructed novel, massive, detailed, teeming with characters, unfolds from 1940, when the Lodz Ghetto was created by the occupying Germans, to 1944, when the last of its inhabitants were deported to the death camps. During those few years, the ghetto was ruled with ruthless cruelty by Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski. – Anna Porter

* * *

1Q84 By Haruki Murakami translated by Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel

In 1984 Tokyo, Aomame is a fitness instructor, massage therapist and assassin, killing men who commit violence against women. Tengo is an aspiring novelist and amiable loner. All they really need, it turns out, is each other. This colossus is expansive, enthralling, but also an over-long and occasionally exasperating foray into the lure of fanatical beliefs. – Charles Foran

* * *

Ragnarok: The End of the Gods by A.S. Byatt

The premise for Byatt’s retelling of the Norse myths is simple and compelling: A girl is sent from the wartime London blitz to the country. At 3, she is taught to read, and her book-born life of the imagination begins. These imaginings are enormously expanded upon, and influenced forever, when her mother gives her Asgard and the Gods. – Gale Zoë Garnett

Go to the Canada Council for the Arts site for the full list of winners.

**
Patrick deWitt
The Sisters Brothers

Brothers Eli and Charlie Sisters are at the centre of this “great greedy heart” of a book. A rollicking tale of hired guns, faithful horses and alchemy. The ingenious prose of Patrick DeWitt conveys a dark and gentle touch.
.
.
.

Update November 8:

The 2011 Giller prize was awarded to:

Esi Edugyan
Half-Blood Blues

Of the winning book, the jurors wrote:

"Imagine Mozart were a black German trumpet player and Salieri a bassist, and 18th century Vienna were WWII Paris; that's Esi Edugyan's joyful lament, Half-Blood Blues. It's conventional to liken the prose in novels about jazz to the music itself, as though there could be no higher praise. In this case, say rather that any jazz musician would be happy to play the way Edugyan writes. Her style is deceptively conversational and easy, but with the simultaneous exuberance and discipline of a true prodigy. Put this book next to Louis Armstrong's "West End Blues" – these two works of art belong together."

* * *

The 2011 Scotiabank Giller prize short list

In the following list, click on the book titles and scroll down the library catalogue page to see the book summary. To read the jurors' comments, click the link 2011 Scotia Giller prize short list

**

David Bezmozgis
The Free World
.
.
.
.
.

* * *

**
Lynn Coady
The Antagonist
.
.
.
.
.

* * *

**
Patrick deWitt
The Sisters Brothers

.
.
.
.

* * *

**
Zsuzsi Gartner
Better Living Through Plastic Explosives

.
.
.
.
.

* * *

**
Michael Ondaatje
The Cat's Table
.
.
.

The 2011 Scotiabank Giller prize long list
was announced September 6.
In the following list, click on the book titles and scroll down the library catalogue page to see the book summary.

David Bezmozgis
The Free World

* * *

Clark Blaise
The Meagre Tarmac

* * *

Michael Christie
The Beggar's Garden

* * *

Lynn Coady
The Antagonist

* * *

Patrick deWitt
The Sisters Brothers

* * *

Readers' Choice winner

Myrna Dey
Extensions

* * *

Esi Edugyan
Half-Blood Blues

* * *

Marina Endicott
The Little Shadows

* * *

Zsuzsi Gartner
Better Living Through Plastic Explosives

* * *

Genni Gunn
Solitaria

* * *

Pauline Holdstock
Into the Heart of the Country

* * *

Wayne Johnston
A World Elsewhere

* * *

Dany Laferrière (trans. David Homel)
The Return

* * *

Suzette Mayr
Monoceros

* * *

Michael Ondaatje
The Cat's Table

* * *

Guy Vanderhaeghe
A Good Man

* * *

Alexi Zentner
Touch
.
.
.
.