Annal:1993 Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction

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Results of the Governor General's Literary Award in the year 1993. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:

The Stone Diaries

Carol Shields

The Stone Diaries is the story of one woman’s life; a truly sensuous novel that reflects and illuminates the unsettled decades of our century.

Born in 1905, Daisy Goodwill drifts through the chapters of childhood, marriage, widowhood, remarriage, motherhood and old age. Bewildered by her inability to understand her own role, Daisy attempts to find a way to tell her own story within a novel that is itself about the limitations of autobiography.

 

For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down

David Adams Richards

A suspenseful and moving novel which has at its centre one of Richards’ most memorable and haunting characters. It is the fall of 1989 in a small Miramichi mill town. Jerry Bines is acquitted of murder and returns home to his estranged wife and young son, with hopes for a new beginning. But when he learns that Gary Percy Rils has escaped from prison, he has good reason to fear for his own safety and that of others. In his attempts to protect his family from Rils by taking him under his wing, Bines sets in motion a series of events that ultimately leads to tragedy. The story of what happens unfolds piece by piece, as related by police reports, interviews, and by a man to a boy. Vivid in its sense of place, this penetrating chronicle of lives is both dark and redemptive, devastating and comic. This novel was made into a Gemini Award-winning film of the same name.

 

Green Grass, Running Water

Thomas King

This latest novel from King is an imaginative exploration of contemporary Native American culture, revolving around the escape from a mental hospital of four very old Indians: Ishmael, Hawkeye, Robinson Crusoe and the Lone Ranger. These, however, are no ordinary natives. They may be the last survivors of the Indians interned at Fort Marion in Florida in the 19th century. Or perhaps they are the first human beings, as described in tribal creation myths. Their repeated breakouts--37 to date--have coincided with disasters: the 1929 stock market crash, the eruption of Mt. St. Helens, etc. Their mission this time brings them into the lives of an eccentric Canadian Blackfoot family: Lionel Red Dog, who sells TV sets and has no ambition; his sister Latisha, who owns a restaurant that bilks thrill-seeking tourists by purporting to serve them dog meat; Uncle Eli Stands Alone, a former university professor who is determined to prevent the operation of a dam on Indian land; and Charlie Looking Bear, a smarmy lawyer who works for the company opposing Eli's cause.

 

Bad Imaginings: Stories

Caroline Adderson

‘Caroline Adderson’s imaginings are about as far from bad as imaginings can get. The stories in her debut collection are powerfully conceived, subtly constructed, and amazingly diverse in tone. Adopting the perspectives of a wildly eclectic group of characters, her prose is always fresh: Adderson is as comfortable in the boots of a 19th-century gold miner as she is in the crocheted slippers of a sad and embittered grandmother. And despite some very poignant moments, she is never sentimental.

 

Visible Light

Carol Windley

 
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