Annal:1992 Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Governor General's Literary Award in the year 1992. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 1992 Booker winner
- 1992 Governor General's winner
- Score: 20.42
During the final moments of World War II, in a deserted Italian villa, four people come together: a young nurse, her will broken, all her energy focused on her last, dying patient, a man in whom she has seen something “she wanted to learn, to grow into and hide in”; an unknown Englishman, survivor of a plane crash, his mind awash with a life’s worth of secrets and passions; a thief whose “skills” have made him one of the war’s heroes, and one of its casualties; an Indian soldier in the British army, an expert at bomb disposal who believes “the only thing safe is himself.”
- 1992 Governor General's finalists
- Score: 6.42
Scriptwriter Amy Barber travels by car from Toronto to Winnipeg with her younger lover, Piotr, a Polish filmmaker. This is a journey shadowed by the future, and the past. The narrative moves from a small Manitoba town during one extraordinary hot summer at the close of the fifties when the death of Amy’s sister changes everything, to the time when Amy marries, goes to live in the city, and begins to have reason to fear for her young son’s well-being. Birdsell’s haunting, almost tactile evocation of the dangerous territory of the past is infused with an uneasy nostalgia. Her unforgettable characters are portrayed as complex, fallible beings and, through them, she explores the private, sometimes cruel realm of relationships and the universal quest for an often elusive self-acceptance.
The Afterlife of George Cartwright
- 1992 Governor General's finalists
- Score: 6.42
In this stunning and original novel, John Steffler has recreated a lost time and place, and has given life to an enigmatic figure from Canada’s 18th-century past. Described quietly by historians as “soldier, diarist, entrepreneur,” George Cartwright emerges in Steffler’s tale as a character of overwhelming appetite and ambition. Until this time Cartwright’s greatest legacy has been the place in Labrador named after him and the journal he wrote during his years there, when he lived amongst Native people and ran a successful trading post. Now his legacy becomes our own: a telling portrait of our past; a warning.
