International Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, and three Governor General's Awards for English-language fiction. Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries was the winner of the 2013 Governor General's Award for fiction, and was also shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. This gripping murder mystery, which takes place in a remote gold-mining frontier town in nineteenthcentury New Zealand, describes how three unsolved crimes link the fates and fortunes of twelve men. The award committee praised the work as a feat of literary design and the author's skilful use of precise sensual prose to reveal the complexities of her characters. The finalist The Lion Seeker, by Kenneth Bonert, is a debut novel that explores the dilemmas of a young Jewish immigrant in Johannesburg, South Africa, during the Great Depression, just before the Second World War. This powerful historical novel was lauded for its profoundly illuminating narrative and its vivid lyrical prose. The Orenda, another shortlisted work, was written by Joseph Boyden, one of Canada's most talented and wellknown Aboriginal authors. The novel is a vast epic that describes the clash of several cultures: first through the war between two First Nations, which begins when Bird, a great Huron warrior and elder, kidnaps Snow Falls, an Iroquois girl who is gifted with magical powers, and then through the traumatic first contact between Old World and New when Jesuit Missionaries try to introduce Christianity to the Huron. Boyden's work was singled out as a sublime and visionary achievement of myth making. Another finalist, A Beautiful Truth by Colin McAdam, is a work about two chimpanzees and their human caretakers. The story is told from two perspectives -those of people and of animals. Critics especially acclaimed the author's daring inventiveness with style and narrative. Shyam Selvadurai's shortlisted novel, The Hungry Ghosts, describes the travails of Shivan Rassiah, a young gay man of mixed Tamil and Sinhalese lineage, who struggles with the wily, ailing grandmother he has brought to Canada from a civil-war torn Sri Lanka. This tale about the contemporary hero's clashes with the powerful old-world matriarch about racial, political and sexual differences was heralded as a compassionate, well-written fictional exploration of diversity.The Giller Prize Jury was quite lavish in its praise of the works of fiction that were nominated for the award this year. The winner, Lynn Coady's Hellgoing, is a collection of nine stories about the foibles and obsessions of men and women. The work was singled out for its vivid language and extraordinary range of narrative strategies and human situations. Dennis Bock's shortlisted Going Home Again tracks the midlife crises of two brothers who are drawn together after their failed marriages. The novelist's poetic precision and eloquent storytelling in describing the tensions between men and women were especially praised. Another finalist, Craig Davidson's Cataract City, also focuses on the relationship between two men, close...
