Annal:2003 Giller Prize for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Giller Prize in the year 2003. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
The In-Between World of Vikram Lall: A Novel
- 2003 Giller Prize winner
- Score: 10.53
Born in colonial Kenya, Vikram Lall comes of age at the same moment as the colony, which in 1953 is celebrating the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II even as the Mau Mau independence movement is challenging British rule. But while Kenya is being torn apart by idealism, doubt and violent political upheaval, Vic and his sister Deepa begin to search for their place in the world. Neither colonists nor African, neither white nor black, the Indian brother and sister find themselves somewhere in between in their band of playmates: Bill and Annie, British children, and…
Oryx and Crake: A Novel
- 2004 Orange shortlist
- 2003 Booker shortlist
- 2003 Giller Prize shortlist
- 2003 Governor General's finalists
- Score: 24.54
A stunning and provocative new novel by the internationally celebrated author of The Blind Assassin, winner of the Booker Prize, Margaret Atwood’s new novel is so utterly compelling, so prescient, so relevant, so terrifyingly-all-too-likely-to-be-true, that readers may find their view of the world forever changed after reading it. With breathtaking command of her shocking material and with her customary sharp wit and dark humour, Atwood projects us into a conceivable future of our own world, an outlandish yet wholly believable place left devastated in the wake of scientific disaster and populated by characters who will continue to inhabit your dreams long after the book is closed.
The Island Walkers: A Novel
- 2003 Giller Prize shortlist
- Score: 6.53
“Across a bend of Ontario’s Attawan River lies the Island, a small, working-class neighborhood of whitewashed houses and vine-freighted fences, black willows and decaying sheds. Here, for generations, the Walkers have lived among the other mill workers.”
The family’s troubles begin in the summer of 1965, when a union organizer comes to town and Alf Walker is forced to choose between loyalty to his friends at the mill and advancement up the company ranks. Alf’s worries are aggravated by his wife, Margaret, who has never reconciled her middle-class English…
Kilter: 55 Fictions
- 2003 Giller Prize shortlist
- Score: 6.53
A young woman puzzles over the identity of her lost brother; a husband cites a sixteenth-century portrait to explain his lover to his wife; a dead man laments the suicide note he failed to write. With spare, elegant prose Gould crafts quirky gems, compact fusions of humour and pathos. His fictions are full of individuals catching odd glimpses of themselves, of big ideas working themselves out in the minutiae of modern lives.
A t the centre of this varied collection is a coherent vision, a vision of human beings as paradoxical creatures—finite creatures…
The Way the Crow Flies: A Novel
- 2003 Giller Prize shortlist
- Score: 6.53
In her highly anticipated new novel, Ann-Marie MacDonald takes us back to a postwar world. For Madeleine McCarthy, high-spirited and eight years old, her family’s posting to a quiet air force base near the Canadian-American border is at first welcome, secure as she is in the love of her family and unaware that her father, Jack, is caught up in his own web of secrets. The early sixties, a time of optimism infused with the excitement of the space race and overshadowed by the menace of the Cold War, is filtered through the rich imagination of a child as Madeleine…
