Toronto Public Library lists 2011′s most popular books, announces special guest for 2012

The Grid has published a list of the most popular books at the Toronto Public Library in 2011. The number of holds placed by TPL patrons indicate that Toronto likes contemporary CanLit — sorta.

Canadian writers wrote the three most requested fiction titles this year at TPL, with Esi Edugyan’s Scotiabank Giller Prize–winning Half-Blood Blues topping the list, Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table coming in at number two, and Patrick deWitt’s Governor General’s Literary Award–winning The Sisters Brothers at number three.

Adam Gopnik and Shania Twain are the lone canucks to break the top 10 non-fiction books. Gopnik’s The Table Comes First makes it to number seven, and Twain’s From This Moment On is at number 10.

In other TPL news, the library announced today that it will host Anne Rice in the new year. On Feb. 13, 2012, Rice will take the stage at TPL’s Appel Salon for an interview with CBC Radio’s Mary Hynes, in what will be the best-selling author’s first appearance in Toronto in a decade.

Rice will be in town promoting her upcoming novel, The Wolf Gift, a reimagining of the werewolf legend due out the day after her Toronto appearance.

Admission to the event is free, and tickets will be available Jan. 16.

Books of the year 2011: fiction

What makes a book of the year? There’s no formula for deciding. Some are critical darlings, some are word-of-mouth favourites. Some introduce us to important new voices, some represent the best work from established authors. And some are simply exceptional works we think people will be reading and talking about for years to come. Together, these five books made the biggest impact in fiction in 2011.

Click through the images below to read why each book was chosen.

Edugyan’s unpredictable year culminates in Giller win

A novel that, less than a year ago, was without a Canadian publisher has won the country’s most prestigious literary prize. Esi Edugyan’s Half-Blood Blues, about a jazz musician who disappears in Nazi-occupied France, was awarded the $50,000 Scotiabank Giller Prize Tuesday evening, capping an unlikely run that has seen the Calgary-born novelist rise from obscurity to become one of the season’s most buzzed about authors.

Edugyan’s sophomore novel was supposed to appear in the spring with the now bankrupt Key Porter Books. Half-Blood Blues eventually landed with Thomas Allen Publishers, which released the book this summer, months after it had appeared in the U.K. (with the venerable literary press Serpent’s Tail) and the U.S. (Picador).

Accepting the prize at a Toronto gala, Edugyan thanked Thomas Allen publisher Patrick Crean for rescuing the book from limbo. “Thomas Allen has been the most amazing publisher,” she said. “After Key Porter – that wonderful Canadian house – fell apart, he (Patrick) came in and believed in the book and purchased it, and I’m so, so thankful for that. It’s been a wonderful experience, Patrick.”

Edugyan also thanked her editors Jane Warren and John Williams (of Key Porter and Serpent’s Tail, respectively), as well as a trusted early reader, the author Jacqueline Baker. Finally, she acknowledged her husband, poet and novelist Steven Price, “without whom nothing gets written.”

In fact, Price, whose first novel, Into That Darkness, appeared this spring with Thomas Allen, had a hand in getting the book published, too. Crean said Price contacted him in April, “shortly after the problems with Key Porter,” and convinced him to take an advance reading copy to the London Book Fair. After reading the novel on the plane, Crean said he was “absolutely beguiled and amazed.” He signed the book not long after returning to Toronto.

This is the second time Thomas Allen has won the Giller, and only the third time in the prize’s 18-year history that a solely Canadian-owned firm has published the winning title. When Thomas Allen last won the Giller, in 2002, it was for Barbadian-born novelist Austin Clarke’s The Polished Hoe.

Crean described being in the winner’s circle for a second time as “an absolute thrill.” He added: “It’s also a thrill to see a young African-Canadian woman win it. I think we have a lot of wonderful writers of many different backgrounds, but we seem to have a dearth of young writers of that particular heritage.”

Edugyan is a second-generation Canadian whose father emigrated from Ghana in the 1970s.

There are currently 23,000 copies of Half-Blood Blues in print. “Tomorrow morning we’re going to be pushing the button again,” Crean said. “I don’t quite know what the number is going to be, but it’s going to be upwards of 20,000.” Thomas Allen has sold just 250 e-book copies of the novel, but Crean said “that may change very rapidly now.”

Following the controversy that erupted last year when winning publisher Gaspereau Press was unable to keep up with demand for Johanna Skibsrud’s The Sentimentalists, Crean reassured retailers that history isn’t about to repeat itself. “[Gaspereau is] an artisan publisher, and one has to respect that very much,” he said. “We’re a more commercial house, and we keep our eye on the sales figures and make sure there’s enough inventory.”

The Giller is just one among a full slate of literary prizes Edugyan was eligible for this fall. With Giller co-nominee Patrick deWitt she shares the peculiar distinction of having been nominated for all three of Canada’s major literary awards as well as the U.K.’s Man Booker Prize.

Last week, deWitt won the $25,000 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize for his sophomore novel, The Sisters Brothers (House of Anansi Press). Along with Edugyan and deWitt, a third Giller nominee is eligible for the $25,000 Governor General’s Literary Award, which will be handed out next week: David Bezmozgis, nominated for his first novel, The Free World (HarperCollins Canada).

The other Giller nominees were Lynn Coady’s The Antagonist (Anansi), Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table (McClelland & Stewart), and Zsuzsi Gartner’s Better Living Through Plastic Explosives (Hamish Hamilton Canada).

Anansi, which has yet to win a Giller, has now been nominated 10 times, more than any other publisher save Random House of Canada and McClelland & Stewart.

Ondaatje declines Governor General’s Literary Award consideration

Although there’s been much buzz over award newbies Esi Edugyan and Patrick deWitt’s impressive hat trick of nominations, another story unfolded today as Michael Ondaatje’s well-received The Cat’s Table was noticeably absent from this morning’s Governor General’s Literary Award for fiction shortlist.

According to his publisher, McClelland & Stewart, Ondaatje asked for The Cat’s Table, which is shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, to be withdrawn from consideration. The five-time GG winner released this statement through M&S: “This was done as I have received it many times and felt I should not enter a book again. The GG award has been very important to me and I greatly respect it and what it has done for our literature.”

Ondaatje isn’t the first CanLit veteran to bow out of an awards race. In 2009, Alice Munro withdrew from Giller consideration for her short story collection, Too Much Happiness, and both Munro and Margaret Atwood recused themselves the years they served on Giller juries. Two-time Giller nominee Timothy Findley asked that his 2001 novel, Spadework, not be considered “for any literary prizes.”

Edugyan, deWitt complete awards trifecta with GG nods

Two Canadian novelists few people had heard of before this summer continue rack up acclaim from international prize juries.

Esi Edugyan and Patrick deWitt – authors of the novels Half-Blood Blues and The Sisters Brothers, respectively – have been shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for fiction, completing a double trifecta that includes the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Both B.C.-born authors are also finalists for the prestigious Man Booker Prize.

The shortlist is rounded by another Giller finalist, David Bezmozgis’s The Free World, as well as a first novel, Alexi Zentner’s Touch, and Marina Endicott’s The Little Shadows.

One of the season’s most highly touted novels, Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table (McClelland & Stewart), was not submitted for consideration for the prize. Ondaatje, who is shortlisted for the $50,000 Giller, has won the GG for fiction three times before: in 1992 for The English Patient, in 2000 for Anil’s Ghost, and in 2007 for Divisadero.

Also notable are the poetry finalists, three of whom are published by Toronto micro-press BookThug.

The complete shortlists, which include drama, non-fiction, children’s books, and translation, are as follows:

Fiction

• David Bezmozgis, The Free World (HarperCollins Canada)
• Patrick deWitt, The Sisters Brothers (House of Anansi Press)
• Esi Edugyan, Half-Blood Blues (Thomas Allen Publishers)
• Marina Endicott, The Little Shadows (Doubleday Canada)
• Alexi Zentner, Touch (Knopf Canada)

Poetry

• Michael Boughn, Cosmographia: A Post-Lucretian Faux Micro-Epic (BookThug)
• Kate Eichhorn, Fieldnotes, A Forensic (BookThug)
• Phil Hall, Killdeer (BookThug)
• Garry Thomas Morse, Discovery Passages (Talonbooks)
• Susan Musgrave, Origami Dove (McClelland & Stewart)

Drama

• Brendan Gall, Minor Complications: Two Plays (Coach House Books)
• Jonathan Garfinkel, House of Many Tongues (Playwrights Canada Press)
• Erin Shields, If We Were Birds (Playwrights Canada Press)
• Donna-Michelle St. Bernard, Gas Girls (Playwrights Canada Press)
• Vern Thiessen, Lenin’s Embalmers (Playwrights Canada Press)

Non-fiction

• Charles Foran, Mordecai: The Life & Times (Knopf Canada)
• Nathan M. Greenfield, The Damned: The Canadians at the Battle of Hong Kong and the POW Experience, 1941-45 (HarperCollins Canada)
• Richard Gwyn, Nation Maker: Sir John A. Macdonald: His Life, Our Times, Volume Two: 1867-1891 (Random House Canada)
• J.J. Lee, The Measure of a Man: The Story of a Father, a Son, and a Suit (McClelland & Stewart)
• Andrew Nikiforuk, Empire of the Beetle: How Human Folly and a Tiny Bug Are Killing North America’s Great Forests (Greystone Books)

Children’s Literature: Text

• Jan L. Coates, A Hare in the Elephant’s Trunk (Red Deer Press)
• Deborah Ellis, No Ordinary Day (Groundwood Books)
• Christopher Moore, From Then to Now: A Short History of the World (Tundra Books)
• Kenneth Oppel, This Dark Endeavour (HarperCollins Canada)
• Tim Wynne-Jones, Blink & Caution (Candlewick Press)

Children’s Literature: Illustration

• Isabelle Arsenault, Migrant; text by Maxine Trottier (Groundwood Books)
• Kim La Fave, Fishing with Gubby; text by Gary Kent (Harbour Publishing)
• Renata Liwska, Red Wagon; text by Renata Liwska (Philomel Books/Penguin)
• Frank Viva, Along a Long Road; text by Frank Viva (HarperCollins Canada)
• Cybèle Young, Ten Birds; text by Cybèle Young (Kids Can Press)

Translation: French to English

• Judith Cowan, Meridian Line (Signal Editions); English translation of Origine des méridiens by Paul Bélanger (Éditions du Noroît)
• David Scott Hamilton, Exit (Anvil Press); English translation of Paradis, clef en main by Nelly Arcan (Les Éditions Les 400 coups)
• Lazer Lederhendler, Apocalypse for Beginners (Vintage Canada); English translation of Tarmac by Nicolas Dickner (Éditions Alto)
• Lazer Lederhendler, Dirty Feet (House of Anansi Press); English translation of Les pieds sales by Edem Awumey (Les Éditions du Boréal)
• Donald Winkler, Partita for Glenn Gould (McGill-Queen’s University Press); English translation of Partita pour Glenn Gould by Georges Leroux (Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal)

Slideshow: Scotiabank Giller Prize shortlist

For the first time since 2004, the Scotiabank Giller Prize shortlist includes six titles. Before you place your bet, here’s a quick look at this year’s nominees:

TPL union names winners of lunch with Atwood contest

The Toronto Public Library Workers Union has announced the winners of its “Why My Library Matters to Me” personal essay contest. Each of the 44 winners will have lunch and tour a local literary landmark with a participating author — Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Linwood Barclay, Joy Fielding, Judy Fong-Bates, Sylvia Fraser, Vincent Lam, Robert Rotenberg, Susan Swan, Anna Porter, or Jeremy Tankard.

The contest is part of the union’s Project Rescue campaign to prevent library funding cuts as proposed by the municipal government. (Q&Q has previously reported on the contest and Project Rescue.)

In an e-mail to Project Rescue supporters, TPLWU/CUPE Local 4948 president Maureen O’Reilly says more than 500 submissions were received in a span of two weeks. The winning entries are now posted at the contest website, including this homage to Charlie Chaplin.

Fall preview 2011: Canadian fiction

In the July/August issue, Q&Q looks ahead at the fall season’s biggest books.

NOVELS

One of the most anticipated releases of the fall season is surely the new novel from internationally acclaimed author Michael Ondaatje, his first since 2007 Governor General’s Literary Award winner Divisadero. Set in the early 1950s, The Cat’s Table (McClelland & Stewart, $32 cl., Sept.) tells the story of an 11-year-old boy crossing the Indian Ocean on a liner bound for England, and the mysterious prisoner shackled on board. • Also from M&S is Guy Vanderhaeghe’s first novel in eight years. Set in the late 19th-century Canadian and American West, A Good Man ($32.99 cl., Sept.) is the third book in a loose trilogy that also includes The Last Crossing (2003) and The Englishman’s Boy, which won the 1996 Governor General’s Literary Award. • A third GG winner has a new novel out this season: David Gilmour, who won in 2005 for his previous novel, A Perfect Night to Go to China. Gilmour returns with The Perfect Order of Things (Thomas Allen Publishers, $26.95 cl., Sept.), the story of a man who revisits traumatic and life-changing incidents from his past.

Marina Endicott follows up her Scotiabank Giller Prize–shortlisted 2008 novel Good to a Fault with The Little Shadows (Doubleday Canada, $32.95 cl., Sept.), about three sisters who become vaudeville singers following the death of their father. • Acclaimed novelist Helen Humphreys returns with an historical novel set in France during the Napoleonic period. The Reinvention of Love (HarperCollins Canada, $29.99 cl., Sept.) is about a French journalist whose affair with Victor Hugo’s wife causes a scandal (as it might be expected to do).

Brian Francis’s debut novel, Fruit, was a runner-up in the 2009 edition of CBC’s battle of the books, Canada Reads. His second novel, Natural Order (Doubleday Canada, $29.95 cl., Aug.), tells the story of a mother who is forced to confront the secrets she has kept about her son when her carefully constructed life is overturned by a startling revelation. • Kevin Chong returns to fiction with his first novel in a decade. Beauty Plus Pity (Arsenal Pulp Press, $17.95 pa., Sept.) follows an Asian-Canadian slacker in Vancouver whose incipient modelling career is derailed by the death of his father and the sudden departure of his fiancée.

Requiem (HarperCollins Canada, $32.95 cl., Sept.), the third novel from Frances Itani, is about a Japanese-Canadian who embarks upon a cross-country journey of discovery following the death of his wife. • Anita Rau Badami follows her best-selling novels Tamarind Mem and The Hero’s Walk with Tell It to the Trees (Knopf Canada, $32 cl., Sept.), about the Dharma family – the authoritarian Vikram, the gourmand Suman, and the old storyteller Akka. When the Dharmas’ tenant, Anu, turns up dead on their doorstep, the family’s long-buried secrets begin to boil over. • Gayla Reid returns with her first novel since 2002’s Closer Apart. Set during the Spanish Civil War, Come from Afar (Cormorant Books, $32 cl., Aug.) tells the story of an Australian nurse who falls into a relationship with a Canadian soldier from the International Brigade.

Haitian expat Dany Laferrière is back with his third novel in translation in three years. The Return (Douglas & McIntyre, $22.95 pa., Aug.) tells the story of a 23-year-old Haitian named Dany who flees Baby Doc Duvalier’s repressive regime and relocates to Montreal. Thirty-three years later, Dany learns of his father’s death in New York City, and plots a return to his native country. David Homel translates. • Another Montreal resident, poet Sina Queyras, has a novel out this fall, the author’s first. Autobiography of Childhood (Coach House Books, $20.95 pa., Oct.) is about one day in the lives of five siblings haunted by the death of a brother years before. • Infrared (McArthur & Company, $29.95 cl., Sept.), the new novel by Nancy Huston, is about a photographer who travels to Tuscany with her father and stepmother. Employing internal dialogues with the photographer’s mental doppelgänger, Huston opens up her hero for exposure and provides an intimate picture of her interior life.

CanLit mainstay David Helwig returns with a novella, his first since 2007’s Smuggling Donkeys. Killing McGee (Oberon, $38.95 cl., $18.95 pa., Oct.) tells the story of a professor’s dual obsessions with the assassination of D’Arcy McGee and the disappearance of one of his students. • Toronto-based poet Dani Couture returns with her first novel, a surreal and iconoclastic take on that perennial CanLit staple: the family drama. Algoma (Invisible Publishing, $19.95 pa., Oct.) tells the story of a family attempting to cope with the aftermath of a young child falling through the ice and drowning. • Shari Lapeña also has a novel about a perennial CanLit concern: raising money to allow one time to write poetry. Happiness Economics (Brindle & Glass, $19.95 pa., Sept.) tells the story of a stalled poet who takes a job writing advertising copy to start a poetry foundation.

Jamaican-born novelist, poet, and non-fiction author Olive Senior returns to long-form fiction with Dancing Lessons (Cormorant, $22 pa., Aug.), about a woman looking back on her life after a hurricane destroys her home. • Memoirist Frances Greenslade (A Pilgrim in Ireland, By the Secret Ladder) has a debut novel out this August. Shelter (Random House Canada, $29.95 cl.) is a coming of age story about two sisters searching for their mother, who abandoned them after their father was killed in a logging accident.

Not one, but two novels this season extend the burgeoning CanLit focus on towns that have been/are about to be flooded (after Johanna Skibsrud’s The Sentimentalists, Anne Michaels’ The Winter Vault, and Michael V. Smith’s Progress). Tristan Hughes’s Eye Lake (Coach House, $19.95 pa., Oct.) is about the town of Crooked River, Ontario. Named for a river that was diverted to make way for a mine, the town harbours secrets that surface when the river reclaims its original course. • And in September, Goose Lane Editions will publish Riel Nason’s The Town that Drowned ($19.95 pa.), about the suspicions, secrets, and emotions that flare up when the township of Haverton is scheduled to be flooded to allow for the construction of a massive dam.

Edward Riche follows up his Thomas Head Raddall Award winner The Nine Planets with Easy to Like (House of Anansi Press, $29.95 cl., Sept.), a satire about a screenwriter and oenophile who dreams of travelling to Paris, but is trapped in Canada by an expired passport and a growing Hollywood scandal. Relocating to Toronto, he bluffs his way into the upper echelons of the CBC. • Former president and CEO of Penguin Canada, David Davidar was forced out of his position under a cloud of scandal after accusations of sexual harassment. Davidar’s new novel, Ithaca (M&S, $29.99 cl., Oct.), is, perhaps not coincidentally, about the rise and fall of a publishing star.

Canadian literary icon Michel Tremblay returns with a new novel, the first in a trilogy. Set in 1913, Crossing the Continent (Talonbooks, $18.95 pa., Oct.) takes the author’s characters out of Quebec for the first time, to tell the backstory of the people who populate his Chroniques du Plateau-Mont-Royal series. Long-time Tremblay collaborator Sheila Fischman translates.

A resident of St. John’s, Newfoundland, lately one of the most fertile spots for Canadian writing, Michelle Butler Hallett crafts genre-busting stories and novels that frequently experiment with gender and perspective. Her new novel, Deluded Your Sailors (Creative Book Publishing, $21.95 pa., Sept.), focuses on the culture industry from the perspective of Nichole Wright, who makes a discovery that puts a government-funded tourism project in jeopardy, and a shape-shifting minister named Elias Winslow. • Another Newfoundland native, Kate Story, has a novel out with Creative this season. The follow-up to 2008’s Blasted, Wrecked Upon This Shore ($21.95 pa., Sept.) tells the story of Pearl Lewis, an emotionally damaged, charismatic woman who is seen at different stages in her life.

In 1972, Christina Parr returns to her hometown of Parr’s Landing, a place she fled years earlier. The dirty secret of Parr’s Landing? A 300-year-old vampire resides in the caves of the remote mining town. Christina learns why she should have stayed away in Michael Rowe’s Enter, Night (ChiZine Publications, $17.95 pa., Oct.). • English literature professor Janey Erlickson struggles to make headway in her academic career while caring for a tyrannical toddler in Sue Sorensen’s comic novel A Large Harmonium (Coteau Books, $21 pa., Sept.). • Paul Brenner, a Vancouver lawyer, dines with his son, Daniel, one Friday evening. The next day, Brenner receives word that his son has been murdered. Hold Me Now (Freehand Books, $21.95 pa., Oct.), the first novel from Stephen Gauer, examines a father’s grief and a lawyer’s faith in the legal system.

SHORT FICTION

Anyone who has ever wondered what might transpire if the author of Bigfoot’s autobiography were to illustrate a story collection by Canada’s reigning postmodern ironist can stop wondering. October sees the publication of Highly Inappropriate Tales for Young People (Random House Canada, $24 cl.), the first collaboration between author Douglas Coupland and well-known illustrator Graham Roumieu.

D.W. Wilson currently lives in London, England, but is a native of B.C.’s Kootenay Valley. The winner of the inaugural Man Booker Prize Scholarship from the University of East Anglia, Wilson’s debut collection, Once You Break a Knuckle (Hamish Hamilton Canada, $32 cl., Sept.), is a suite of stories about good people doing bad things.

Novelist Anne DeGrace has her first collection of short stories on tap for September. Flying with Amelia (McArthur & Company, $29.95 cl.) spans the 20th century and crosses vast swathes of territory. Wireless telegraphy, German POWs in Manitoba, the Great Depression, and the FLQ crisis all crop up in her stories. • David Whitton’s story “Twilight of the Gods” was included in the 2010 sci-fi anthology Darwin’s Bastards. The story also appears in Whitton’s first solo collection, The Reverse Cowgirl (Freehand, $21.95 pa., Oct.), which sports the most sexually suggestive title for a collection of CanLit stories since Pasha Malla’s The Withdrawal Method.

Toronto writer Rebecca Rosenblum follows up her Metcalf-Rooke Award–winning debut collection Once (a Q&Q book of the year for 2009) with The Big Dream (Biblioasis, $19.95 pa., Sept.), a collection of linked stories about the lives of workers at Dream, Inc., a lifestyle-magazine publisher. • The Maladjusted (Thistledown Press, $18.95 pa., Sept.), Toronto writer Derek Hayes’ debut collection, focuses on people who run afoul of the dictates of polite society. • Also from Thistledown, Britt Holmström’s Leaving Berlin ($18.95 pa., Sept.) examines contemporary women in both Canadian and European settings.

The fine print: Q&Q’s fall preview covers books published between July 1 and Dec. 31, 2011. All information (titles, prices, publication dates, etc.) was supplied by publishers and may have been tentative at Q&Q’s press time. • Titles that have appeared in previous previews do not appear here.

Advance review: Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table

This review of Michael Ondaatje’s new novel, The Cat’s Table, will appear in the November issue of Q&Q.

Guest reviewer Ami Sands Brodoff writes:

Certain experiences are galvanizing and become indelible, shaping a life. Such is true of the sea voyage at the heart of Michael Ondaatje’s sixth novel, a story so enveloping and beautifully rendered, one is reluctant to disembark at the end of the journey.

Read the rest of the review

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Toronto Public Library union to hold read-in

The Toronto Public Library Workers Union will hold a read-in Sunday, Aug. 28, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. at Nathan Phillips Square. The event is being held in support of local library branches that have been threatened with closures, service reductions, and cuts to operating hours.

According to the group’s Facebook event page, the union aims to “gather all book lovers young and old alike to show their love for the free services provided by your local library…. Together let’s send a strong and loud message to [mayor Rob Ford and city councillor Doug Ford]: our public library is not for sale!” The notice goes on to invite the public to join library staff and members of Toronto’s literary community with a book and a blanket for a family-friendly afternoon of storytelling and communal reading.

The read-in is the latest in a series of public outreach initiatives organized by the union, including information pickets at North York Central Library and the Toronto Reference Library, and  the union’s widely publicized Project Rescue campaign. So far the campaign includes an online petition with over 46,000 names, and a personal essay contest supported by the likes of Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, and Anna Porter, which launched Thursday.