Annal:2005 Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Governor General's Literary Award in the year 2005. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
A Perfect Night to Go to China
- 2005 Governor General's winner
- Score: 10.55
This astonishing novel—unlike anything Gilmour has ever written before—begins with every parent’s worst nightmare: the disappearance of a child. A father makes a casual error of judgement one evening and leaves his six-year-old son alone for fifteen minutes. When he returns the child is gone and three lives are changed forever. Pursued by an unshakeable conviction that his son is speaking directly to him, Roman begins to enter a haunting relationship with the missing child and his own conscience. In the meantime, his behaviour becomes increasingly erratic and he is rejected by his grieving and angry wife, eventually fired from his job, and shadowed by a persistent policeman who thinks Roman is hiding the child.
Written in the clear, elegant prose Gilmour is known for, “A Perfect Night to Go to China” is a completely absorbing and original work of fiction. It sets up a harrowing premise and doesn’t let up until the last surprising page.
- 2005 Governor General's finalists
- Score: 6.55
In this powerful and mesmerizing debut, Joseph Boyden reinvents the tradition of Great War epics like All Quiet on the Western Front and Birdsong. It is 1919 and Niska, an Oji- Cree medicine woman, has left her home in the bush of northern Ontario to retrieve Xavier Bird, her only relation, who has returned from the trenches of Europe. Gravely wounded and addicted to morphine, Xavier recounts how he and his best friend, Elijah Whiskeyjack, prowled the battlefields as snipers of enormous skilland how the circumstances of their deadly craft led them to very different fates. Told with unblinking focus, this is a stunning tale of brutality, survival, and rebirth that marks the arrival of a prodigious new talent.
Nellcott Is My Darling: A Novel
- 2005 Governor General's finalists
- Score: 6.55
Alice Darling has just moved to Montreal to go to McGill University. She’s never had a boyfriend and doesn’t know how to do laundry. She joins the Film Society and hangs out in the library. She drifts away from boring Bethany, her best friend from high school, and starts to trail after Allegra, the caffeine-addicted, dish-throwing artist in the dorm room next to hers. And, most of all, she thinks about how she’s still a virgin and how she’ll never figure it all out.
And then she meets Nellcott Ragland, a 23-year-old who works at Basement Records and wears black eyeliner, and he asks her on a date.
Alice tries to hide out in the Film Society office. She spies on Nellcott at the record store. She gets advice from Walker, her filmmaking, womanizing friend from Toronto. But sooner or later her parents are going to visit and watch her cry. She won’t admit it to them, but Nellcott has become her darling.
Ladykiller: Stories
- 2005 Governor General's finalists
- Score: 6.55
In her debut collection of razor-edged short fiction, Vancouver’s Charlotte Gill explores the seamy side of sex in the city. The ladykiller of the title story gets his kicks from rubbing up against strange women in malls and parking garages. Other protagonists include a washed-up diving instructor who can’t stop fantasizing about his 16-year-old student, a confused young woman who drifts into a disastrous affair with her middle-aged professor, and barracuda-like twin sisters on the prowl for men on a Thai beach. In “Hush,” the most disturbing of these seven tales of contemporary urban life, a desperate couple fixates on the crying baby in the apartment below in a vain attempt to repair their frying relationship. “Hush” was a finalist for the Journey Prize, but an even more artful piece of fiction is the opening story, “You Drive.”
