Annal:2000 Giller Prize for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Giller Prize in the year 2000. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
Anil's Ghost: A Novel
- 2000 Giller Prize winner
- 2000 Governor General's winner
- 2000 Kiriyama-Fiction winner
- Score: 30.5
The time is our own time. The place is Sri Lanka, the island nation formerly known as Ceylon, off the southern tip of India, a country steeped in centuries of cultural achievement and tradition—and forced into the late twentieth century by the ravages of civil war and the consequences of a country divided against itself.
Into this maelstrom steps a young woman, Anil Tissera, born in Sri Lanka, educated in England and America, a forensic anthropologist sent by an international human rights group to work with local officials to discover the source of the…
Mercy Among the Children: A Novel
- 2000 Giller Prize winner
- 2000 Governor General's finalists
- Score: 16.5
Believing he may have accidentally killed a friend, Sydney Henderson makes a pact with God. If God will spare the boy’s life, Sydney will never again harm another human being.
In the years that follow, the self-educated, brilliant and now almost pathologically gentle Sydney holds true to his promise. Yet others in the small rural community in New Brunswick view Sydney’s pacifism as an opportunity to exploit and torment the defenseless Hendersons. Tragedy strikes when a small boy dies as a result of an act of sabotage and revenge gone horribly wrong. It is a…
Burridge Unbound: A Novel
- 2000 Giller Prize shortlist
- Score: 6.5
After surviving a terrifying ordeal at the hands of terrorists in the South Pacific island of Santa Irene, Bill Burridge returns home to Ottawa and casts himself single-mindedly into building a human-rights organization to stand watch over the world’s most troubled areas. Yet, plagued by memories of his incarceration and by the strain of his disintegrating marriage, he is a man struggling to hold his life together. When a democratic revolution stands Santa Irene on a knife-edge between chaos and healing, Burridge reluctantly agrees to serve on a Truth Commission…
A Student of Weather: A Novel
- 2000 Giller Prize shortlist
- Score: 6.5
Maurice Dove is a visitor to the Saskatchewan farm of widower Ernest Hardy. The relationship he forms with Hardy’s daughters—the beautiful, virtuous Lucinda and the dark, intelligent, younger Norma-Joyce—gives rise to an act of betrayal that throws into relief the deep-rooted enmity between them. Norma-Joyce’s life, from the time she is eight, is fuelled by her obsessive (and unrequited) love for Maurice Dove. Later, in pursuing her life as an artist, she makes discoveries about her past that bring the story full-circle.
Hay’s evocation of place is palpable,…
Monkey Beach: A Novel
- 2000 Giller Prize shortlist
- 2000 Governor General's finalists
- Score: 12.5
Five hundred miles north of Vancouver is Kitamaat, an Indian reservation in the homeland of the Haisla people. Growing up a tough, wild tomboy, swimming, fighting, and fishing in a remote village where the land slips into the green ocean on the edge of the world, Lisamarie has always been different. Visited by ghosts and shapeshifters, tormented by premonitions, she can’t escape the sense that something terrible is waiting for her. She recounts her enchanted yet scarred life as she journeys in her speedboat up the frigid waters of the Douglas Channel. She is…
- 2000 Giller Prize shortlist
- Score: 6.5
In 1822, Edward Harriott, a Hudson’s Bay Company clerk on the North Saskatchewan River, began his greatest adventure in the fur trade, an expedition to the Bow and Missouri Rivers in search of new sources of beaver. A young man, he was full of promise and full of love for his Metis cousin Margaret. But something went wrong. The expedition failed and the new fur trade Governor unfairly blamed Harriort. When the Governor took a fancy to Harriott’s Margaret, misfortune deepened into disaster.
Written between the lines of recorded history, The Trade…
