There's a review in recent Globe and Mail editions of all five short-listed titles:
The Matter with Morris by David Bergen
Phyllis Bruce Books/HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. (Available as an ebook from:
kobobooks)
Quote:
David Bergen's mourning glory
Reviewed by Steven Hayward
Morris Schutt, the hero of Giller Prize-winner David Bergen’s new novel, The Matter With Morris (just long-listed for this year’s Scotiabank Giller Prize), used to be happy. Fifty-one years old, a successful newspaper columnist living in Winnipeg, he was once, in the recent past, a man with a Jaguar and a sexy psychiatrist wife. He had a pair of daughters, a grandchild and a son named Martin who smoked up too much and dropped out of university.
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Full review of
The Matter with Morris here.
Light Lifting by Alexander MacLeod
Biblioasis (Available as an ebook from:
kobobooks)
Quote:
Like father, like son
Reviewed by Jim Bartley
For Alexander MacLeod, the paternal shoes (more aptly, wellies) to be filled could not be much be bigger. In the 1970s and 80s, Alistair MacLeod gathered glowing critical and popular acclaim on the strength of his uncommonly pure and spare short fiction. He went on to win, among other awards, the 2001 IMPAC Dublin Prize for his haunting and majestic novel No Great Mischief. MacLeod’s finely honed humanity, expressed with a simplicity that frequently belies the depth and force of its final effects, has by consensus made him one of our CanLit saints.
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Full review of
Light Lifting here.
This Cake is for the Party by Sarah Selecky
Thomas Allen Publishers (Available as an ebook from:
kobobooks)
Quote:
A very tasty confection, crumbs and all
Reviewed by Lisa Foad
The cover of Sarah Selecky’s debut fiction collection is striking in its insistence upon ruin, lack and nostalgia: A jaggedly reassembled smashed plate is home to a cluster of crumbs, a consumption-smeared fork and the counter-insistent title declaration, This Cake is for the Party. And while the collection explores sites of emotional and physical volatility, Selecky sinks her teeth into something far more powerful than the violence of loss: She skillfully wrests devastation from its customary gloom of lamentation and regret, and bares its overwhelming beauty.
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Full review of
This Cake is for the Party here.
The Sentimentalists by Johanna Skibsrud
Gaspereau Press (Available as an ebook from:
kobobooks)
Quote:
Haunted by the ghosts of war
Reviewed by Zoe Whittall
The Sentimentalists is a debut novel by Johanna Skibsrud, the youngest author to be short-listed for the Scotiabank Giller Prize since it debuted in 2004 with a nomination for then 29-year-old Shyam Selvardurai. This beautifully designed book – no surprise since it originates from the aesthetes at Gaspereau Press – is a sombre story about the emotional ghosts of war and the unreliable nature of memory. Children of the vibrant boomer generation dealing uncomfortably with their aging parents will likely, as I did, find much to relate to.
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Full review of
The Sentimentalists here.
Annabel by Kathleen Winter
House of Anansi Press (Available as an ebook from:
kobobooks)
Quote:
It's a boy! It's a girl! It's...
Reviewed by Christine Fischer Guy
It’s fair to say the riddle of gender has engaged Kathleen Winter for some time now. Her 2007 collection of short stories, boYs, limned the daily disconnections between the sexes, major and minor, that keep us from fully comprehending one another. So the fact that she chose a hermaphrodite as the main character for her first novel represents a natural progression: The baby is a literal union of the sexes.
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Full review of
Annabel here.
Reminder: The prize is awarded November 8th in Toronto.