Category Archives: Prize Winner

November 8, 2025 · 3:45 pm

Curiosities: Delightful

So you have to trust me that it’s worth getting into Anne Flemming’s Curiosities. You’re going to start it and think ‘this reading old english-style spelling is too annoying’ or ‘the narrator as archivist is a bit of a gimmick’ but then! It’s going to be so great. You’ll get to romp through the plague, and arctic exploration/starvation, and witch trials, and romance – and you’re going to be rewarded with a fantastic love story OR WAIT fantastic love stories that offer the wide range of ways people love and are loved.

Past-Erin who geeked out endlessly historical fiction surfaced throughout reading Curiosities imagining what a fun addition this could be to any seminar on the genre for its playful engagement with the making of history. Read in that genre it does the usual work of acknowledging the limits of the historical record, the ways we have to interpret scraps to piece together a full picture, the way perspective of the writer limits what and how something is told (and who gets full voice).

Celebrated among reviewers for its exploration of sexual and gender identity, I found this part of the book a welcome inclusion but as a background to other questions about care, community, and – yes- curiosity.

So please – put aside your initial irritation at having to Really Focus on the reading (cough, clearly some self-reflection here) and enjoy.

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Filed under Book Club, Canadian Literature, Fiction, Giller prize, Governor Generals, Historical Fiction, Prize Winner

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August 21, 2025 · 12:37 pm

Let Us Descend

I can’t place what I didn’t love about Jesmyn Ward’s Let Us Descend but it was something about an uncertainty of what would be/was the trajectory of Annis’s story. Which makes sense, I know, in a book of slavery and the experience of uncertainty and alienation for those enslaved. And maybe love of a book focused on the slave experience is the wrong aspiration – something closer to appreciation and awe for the brilliant writing, the evocative and rich descriptions, the pacing and poetry.

The novel focuses on Annis and her journey of enslavement from a time with her mother to a slave market to a sugar plantation and beyond. The physical journey is marked by spirits and hauntings that make manifest (or as manifest as a ghost can be) the intergenerational trauma of slavery and violence – and the ways resilience come from the stories we have been told and tell ourselves. I suppose my uncertainty about what the novel was going to be about (like it felt like I kept waiting for the plot to begin? or the core conflict to be made clear?) misunderstands that the story is one of survival – and that the meaningful trajectory of experiencing endless uncertainty of place, people and threatened and real violence – and when and how we can claim autonomy and community amid the most abject dehumanized moments – is itself the life of Annis and the plot we are meant to follow.

So in this instance I think the problem was me as a reader – expecting or wanting something different from the story – while the book itself is an expertly crafted, compact gem.

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Filed under American literature, Fiction, National Book Award, Prize Winner

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August 10, 2025 · 3:21 am

The Burgess Boys: If You Don’t Like Elizabeth Strout I Don’t Want To Hear About It

For years if someone liked a food I found disgusting I’d explain to them why they were wrong and how whatever it was was gross. Turns out this is neither a polite, nor particularly well received exchange. You’re meant to just say ‘oh’ and privately think the other person is wrong and their food choices disgusting. Is it different for book (and movies and TV)? Probably it’s meant to be the same. But my face clearly outwardly flinches when someone tells me how much they enjoyed a book that is objectively bad . (And this from the reader who unashamedly told her boss about the glories of Fourth Wing.)

All this to say I love Elizabeth Strout and at the park the other night was explaining to some other parent (who, to be fair, definitely didn’t care about the book I was reading and definitely didn’t want to be listening to me *at length* describing how great it is, but was trapped both by my enthusiasm and No Clear Exit) and she told me she just didn’t care for Olive Kitteridge. The moment was worse – surely worse – then some partisan political exchange. I looked at her with utter disbelief. What is wrong with this woman, I thought, and thankfully didn’t say. But surely my face and eyes did because I am me and I cannot control my face.

All this to say. I loved The Burgess Boys as I have loved everything else Elizabeth Strout and I do not want to hear about it if you didn’t.

I’ve said before that books find me (all of us) at odd times. Or maybe we read into them whatever it is we need in that time. With The Burgess Boys when the young nephew of Bob Burgess is arrested and detained for throwing a pig’s head into a mosque, and then is surprised by the scale of reaction and consequence and the rest of the book follows how this one decision reverberates through a family I thought ah. Ah.

Which is all to say had I read it another time, or in different circumstances, I might have been struck instead by the way Bob’s entire sense of identity is shifted by his brother Jim’s revelation about the death of their father. Or the thread of the novel that is about how we make our own stories and that these stories are all that matter (not any fact you might claim as such). Or the thread of a marriage betrayal. Or that of discovering love when you aren’t expecting it. Or of the gap between celebrity and individual experience. Or.

But we find in great novels what we need in the moment we read them. And in this Strout novel I found consolation, and beauty, and the reminder that whatever we are in – it is already changing. And that these, the stories we tell of ourselves, our mistakes, our worst moments – are ours to make.

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Filed under American literature, Fiction, Prize Winner

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August 10, 2025 · 12:51 am

The Emperor of Gladness: Such poetry in fast food

Ocean Vuong is a poet, and The Emperor of Gladness is a novel infused with poetry. Such beautiful writing. I was tempted to try to explain how beautiful, but the irony of poorly trying to explain poetic beautiful language was too great a risk. Suffice to say: gorgeous.

And such an odd little plot to have such beauty. The novel opens with our protagonist, Hai, perched on the edge of a bridge ready to jump. Saved instead by an old woman, Grazina, suffering from dementia and ready to be saved, herself, too. The rest of the book follows how they care for one another and try – often failing – to care for themselves and the people around them. Most memorable, I think, is the cast of characters at the fast food restaurant where Hai works – finding among the connection, reciprocity and care he’s been missing.

Of course in a book opening with a suicide attempt, much of the book is spent wondering if Hai will find a way back to stability – and how he will get there. And how Grazina will be allowed to live and die with any dignity. How any of his colleagues will find their way to their specific and relatable and earnest hopes – my favourite being starring in amateur women’s wrestling – along with the dignity of doing work that supports security. In a way I was reminded of Demon Copperfield in the way the novel holds up the failures of systems and structures – health care, justice, education, social services – and the way these failures are felt by individuals.

And so rather then believing in any system that you’ve been told you should trust, The Emperor of Gladness offers instead the fragile security of other people: flawed, ailing, constantly letting us down out of their own hurt and inadequacies – and yet better, ever better then the imagined farce that we can do any of it alone.

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Filed under American literature, Erin's Favourite Books, Fiction, Prize Winner

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