Annal:2005 Giller Prize for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Giller Prize in the year 2005. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
The Time in Between: A Novel
- 2005 Giller Prize winner
- Score: 10.55
In search of love, absolution, or forgiveness, Charles Boatman leaves B.C. and returns mysteriously to the country where he fought twenty-eight years earlier as a young, reluctant soldier. But his new encounters seem irreconcilable with his memories.
When their father disappears, Ada and her brother, Jon, travel to Danang, Vietnam, to find him. Their quest takes them into the heart of a world that is at once incomprehensible, impassive, and beautiful. Chasing her father’s shadow for weeks, following slim leads, Ada feels increasingly hopeless. Yet while Jon…
Luck: A Novel
- 2005 Giller Prize shortlist
- Score: 6.55
Nora, an artist, wakes up one morning to discover that her husband, lying beside her, has died in the night. Naturally, she screams. Beth, Nora’s ethereal artist’s model, and Sophie, the housekeeper, who also live in the big house on the hill, come rushing.
Such startling, terrible things do happen, and Philip’s silent demise is bound to have dramatic effects. The abruptly widowed Nora, whose recent works of biblical art have caused a fundamentalist furor in the town where they live, is unexpectedly confronted by solo life in a place she despises. Beth faces…
- 2005 Giller Prize shortlist
- Score: 6.55
When Lilly is eight years old, her pot-smoking hippie British parents leave her at a Sufi shrine in Morocco and inform her they will be back to collect her in three days. Three weeks later, she learns they’ve been murdered. Lilly fills that haunted hollow in her life with intense study and memorization of the Qur’an under the patient care of the Sufi saint’s disciple she was entrusted to. Years later, her journey from Morocco to Harar, Ethiopia, is half pilgrimage, half flight. In Harar, even her very traditional Muslim head scarves cannot hide her white skin in…
A Wall of Light: A Novel
- 2005 Giller Prize shortlist
- Score: 6.55
“I am Sonya Vronsky, professor of mathematics at Tel Aviv University, and this is the story of a day in late August. On this remarkable day I kissed a student, pursued a lover, found my father, and left my brother.” So begins Edeet Ravel’s captivating novel, which follows Sonya on a life-changing journey that leads her to the heart of Jerusalem, and to the heart of family secrets.
Her day begins as any other, with an elaborate breakfast prepared by her brother. Kostya has always been the centre of their family, working part-time so he can look after everyone…
Alligator: A Novel
- 2005 Giller Prize shortlist
- Score: 6.55
Lisa Moore’s Alligator gives dramatic birth to a new kind of fiction: North Atlantic Gothic. The story moves with the swiftness of a gator in attack mode through the lives of a group of brilliantly rendered characters in contemporary St. John’s, Newfoundland—a city whose spiritual location is somewhere in the heart of Flannery O’Connor country. Its denizens jostle each other in uneasy arabesques of desire, greed, lust, and ambition, juxtaposed with a yearning for purity, depth, and redemption.
Meet Madeleine, the driven aging filmmaker whose mission is…
