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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.

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.
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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.
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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.

Update December 19 - the top book for the Prairies and the North Region is The Age of Hope by David Bergen.
It is now in contention with the other regional winners:
Away by Jane Urquhart
Indian Horse by Richard Wagamese
Two Solitudes by Hugh MacLennan
February by Lisa Moore

Follow the battle of the books at the Canada Reads website.

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This session of Canada Reads divided the country into five regions.
The following list were the Top Ten in the Prairies and the North Region

**** The Age of Hope by David Bergen top contender

* 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

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

The RPL Book Sale is coming up this Saturday, October 27 at the George Bothwell Branch
in the Southland Mall

(Hours: 10 am to 4 pm)

Hardcovers $1
Paperbacks 50 cents
Spoken Word $1
DVDs/CDs $1

No taxes, GST exempt
Save even more when you fill up an RPL bag for $10.

For more details, visit ReginaLibrary.ca
or call 777-6000

Payment by cash only.

For anyone who enjoyed the movie The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, here's the novel it was based on:

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
by Deborah Moggach

or

find it under it's original title
These Foolish Things

Summary: When Dr. Ravi Kapoor's cousin sets up a retirement home in India, Ravi's father-in-law is one of its first guests, but what the renovation lacks in promised amenities and luxury, it makes up for in adventure, stunning beauty, and unexpected love.

Read the book review in The Guardian.
Here is an excerpt:
Moggach, a prolific novelist, makes it her priority to deliver thoughtful, satisfying stories leavened with wit and humanity, peopled by ordinary characters and packaged in excellent unpretentious prose. One often hears the term "a writer's writer". Moggach is one of that much more welcome breed - "a reader's writer".

From the New Fiction selections:

In the Shadow of the Banyan
by Vaddey Ratner

Here's what the Booklist review had to say:

Ratner’s first novel recounts the harrowing experiences of Raami, the seven-year-old daughter of a prince, during the rise ofthe Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and her family’s capture and internment in work camps. What makes her novel especially remarkable is that it’s based on Ratner’s real experiences as a young girl of the Cambodian aristocracy under the Khmer Rouge. Her heartrending, mournful tale depicts the horrors ofthe killing fields and the senselessness ofthe violence there while still managing to capture small, beautiful moments. Raami is an imaginative girl, captivated by her father’s poetry, and it is through his words that she comes to understand the way stories become not only a vehicle for memory but also a source of power. By countering the stark reality of her experience with lyrical descriptions ofthe natural beauty ofthe country and its people, Ratner has crafted an elegiac tribute ofthe country she knew and loved. A note from and interview with Ratner further details her childhood in Cambodia and escape to the U.S.

Read the obituary in The Guardian.

The Novels:

Light a Penny Candle (1982)

The Lilac Bus (1984)

Echoes (1985)

Firefly Summer (1987)

The Silver Wedding (1988)

Circle of Friends (1990)

The Copper Beech (1992)

The Glass Lake (1994)

Evening Class (1996)

Tara Road (1998)

Scarlet Feather (2000)

Quentins (2002)

Nights of Rain and Stars (2004)

Whitethorn Woods (2006)

Heart and Soul (2008)

Minding Frankie (2010)

and
Coming in the autumn of 2012
A Week in Winter (2012)

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Go to her Fantastic Fiction page for the complete list of her work, including collections of short stories.
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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.

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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.

Here are links to a couple of his most famous books:

Fahrenheit 451
A totalitarian regime has ordered all books to be destroyed, but one of the book burners suddenly realizes their merit.

The Martian Chronicles
The tranquility of Mars is disrupted by the earthmen who have come to conquer space, colonize the planet, and escape a doomed Earth.
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and my favourite:

Something Wicked This Way Comes

Story of two young boys who begin to encounter evil secrets when a lightning rod salesman gives them one of his contraptions covered with mystical symbols.
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Check out the library catalogue (SILS) listings for Ray Bradbury. This list includes just the books. For ebooks, audio books and movies, use key words "Ray Bradbury" and then use the "Modify Search" button to select DVD or ebooks, etc.

posted by Sharon