Governor-General's Literary Award Winners (English)

Fiction: The Mistress of Nothing, by Kate Pullinger, follows the fascinating character of Sally, maid to Lady Duff Gordon in Victorian times. Over the course of a memorable journey down the Nile with her Lady, Sally comes to realizations about the nature of power – its seductiveness, its elusiveness and its ability to alter the soul in manifold ways.

Non-fiction: A Place Within: Rediscovering India, by M.G. Vassanji. An utterly brilliant, evocative memoir that ranges across the landscapes of culture, memory, identity and history. M.G. Vassanji's style – diverse and playful – brings the reader along effortlessly, illuminating the ramshackle roots of self, family, and culture. An outstanding book of self-reflection and persistent insight, A Place Within is the resonant chronicle of a sage, a traveler, a pilgrim.

Poetry: The Fly in Autumn, by David Zieroth. These poems address our common and defining human fate – the loneliness that is a rehearsal for death – with a tenderness and buoyancy that shows the reader “how to walk in the dark with flowers.” The intricacy and exuberance of rhyme and the breadth of vision are stunning.

Drama: Where the Blood Mixes, by Kevin Loring.  An abducted daughter returns to her wounded community after many years away. Kevin Loring illuminates the complex aftermath of the residential school system and the circumstances of contemporary Aboriginal history through compelling, sympathetic and humorous characters who live as best they can, with courage and strength.

Children's Literature (Text): Greener Grass: The Famine Years, by Caroline Pignat, follows the disintegration of the Byrne family during Ireland's Great Famine of 1847, when landlords ruled without mercy, children could be taken away to prison, and thousands were left to starve. A timeless story of courage, family loyalty and the resilience of the human spirit.

Children's literature (Illustration): Bella's Tree, by Jirina Marton.  The illustrations invite the reader to a winter landscape full of textures and subtle, earthy colour palettes. The Van Gogh-like interior and its warm tones create a holiday season mood that evokes an emotional response. The illustrations are well crafted and capture the imagination and humanity of the everyday lives they portray.

Translation (French to English): Pieces of Me, by Susan Ouriou.  She has created a magical rendering of the exquisite original. Tenderly redrawing the portrait of a troubled teenage girl struggling to come into her own, Ouriou has sensitively captured all that is moving, poetic and funny about the novel's main character in a truly accomplished translation.

More Governor-General Award details ...

Giller Prize

Winner: The Bishop’s Man by Linden MacIntyre. 

Father Duncan, the first-person narrator, has been his bishop's dutiful enforcer, employed to check the excesses of priests and to suppress the evidence, but he is forced to examine his own past under the strain of suspicion, obsession and guilt. The book is set in Antigonish, a place that MacIntyre calls one of most religious communities in Canada.

Other finalists:

• The Winter Vault, by Anne Michaels, tells a love story set against the displacement caused by the construction of Egypt's Aswan Dam and Canada's St. Lawrence Seaway.
• The Disappeared, by Kim Echlin, about a young Canadian woman who follows her exiled Cambodian lover to his homeland as he searches for his family amid the killing fields.
• The Golden Mean, debut novel by Annabel Lyon, which shines a light on history in its exploration of the story of Aristotle and his one-time pupil, Alexander the Great.
• Fall, by Colin McAdam, a boarding school tale about two roommates — one outgoing and popular, the other a loner — enamoured of a beautiful schoolmate who then, mysteriously, disappears.

Man Booker

Winner: Wolf Hall / Hilary Mantel.

England in the 1520s is a heartbeat from disaster. Henry VIII wants to annul his marriage of twenty years, and marry Anne Boleyn. The pope and most of Europe opposes him. The quest for the king’s freedom destroys his adviser, the brilliant Cardinal Wolsey, and leaves a power vacuum. Into this impasse steps Thomas Cromwell. 

With a vast array of characters, overflowing with incident, the novel re-creates an era when the personal and political are separated by a hairbreadth, where success brings unlimited power but a single failure means death.

Other finalists:

The Children’s Book / A S Byatt

"Byatt's ... latest wanders from Victorian 1895 through the end of WWI, alighting on subjects as diverse as puppetry, socialism, women's suffrage and the Boer War ...  The narrative centers on two deeply troubled families of the British artistic intelligentsia: the Fludds and the Wellwoods. Olive Wellwood, the matriarch, is an author of children's books, and their darkness hints at hidden family miseries. The Fludds' secrets are never completely exposed, but the suicidal fits of the father, a celebrated potter, and the disengaged sadness of the mother and children add up to a chilling family history."

Summertime / J M Coetzee

"A young English biographer is working on a book about the late writer, John Coetzee. He plans to focus on the years from 1972-1977 when Coetzee, in his thirties, is sharing a run-down cottage in the suburbs of Cape Town with his widowed father. This, the biographer senses, is the period when he was ‘finding his feet as a writer’.

Never having met Coetzee, he embarks on a series of interviews with people who were important to him ...

From their testimony emerges a portrait of the young Coetzee as an awkward, bookish individual with little talent for opening himself to others. Within the family he is regarded as an outsider, someone who tried to flee the tribe and has now returned, chastened. His insistence on doing manual work, his long hair and beard, rumours that he writes poetry evoke nothing but suspicion in the South Africa of the time.

Sometimes heartbreaking, often very funny, Summertime shows us a great writer as he limbers up for his task."

The Quickening Maze / Adam Foulds

"From 1837 to 1841, John Clare, the peasant poet, was a patient in a private asylum in the Epping Forest. Clare and his wife Patty had six children and life was proving increasingly burdensome to Clare, who began to suffer bouts of severe depression, leading to alarmingly erratic behaviour and serious delusions. In The Quickening Maze, Adam Foulds has written an imaginative recreation of Clare's years in the High Beech Asylum, and while the result is firmly fictional, the picture presented is realistic and consistent with the known history."

The Glass Room / Simon Mawer

"Honeymooners Viktor and Liesel Landauer are filled with the optimism and cultural vibrancy of central Europe of the 1920s ... [They] pour all of their hopes for their marriage and budding family into their stunning new home, filling it with children, friends, and a generation of artists and thinkers eager to abandon old-world European style in favor of the new and the avant-garde.

But as life intervenes, their new home also brings out their most passionate desires and darkest secrets. As Viktor searches for a warmer, less challenging comfort in the arms of another woman, and Liesel turns to her wild, mischievous friend Hana for excitement, the marriage begins to show signs of strain. The radiant honesty and idealism of 1930 quickly evaporate beneath the storm clouds of World War II. As Nazi troops enter the country, the family must leave their old life behind and attempt to escape to America before Viktor’s Jewish roots draw Nazi attention, and before the family itself dissolves."

The Little Stranger / Sarah Waters. 

"In a dusty post-war summer in rural Warwickshire, a doctor is called to a patient at Hundreds Hall. Home to the Ayres family for over two centuries, the Georgian house, once grand and handsome, is now in decline, its masonry crumbling, its gardens choked with weeds, the clock in its stable yard permanently fixed at twenty to nine. But are the Ayreses haunted by something more sinister than a dying way of life?"

2008 literary awards