AbeBooks: CBC's Canada Reads

Congratulations to Nicolas Dickner, whose compelling novel about attachment, Nikolski, emerged victorious over the competition. The story is one of renewal: In the spring of 1989, three young people born thousands of miles apart each cut themselves adrift from their birthplaces and set out to discover what - or who - might anchor them in their lives. Leaving almost everything behind, they each carry only a few artefacts of their lives so far - possessions so formative that they can’t imagine surviving without them - but also the accumulated memories of their own lives and family histories.

The CBC's 'Canada Reads' - a week long battle of the books - has been an annual event since 2002. The competition sees a panel of noteworthy Canadians each choose a favourite work of fiction to defend, and go head-to-head on air to debate its merits. This year's judges battled it out in half-hour debates aired on CBC Radio One in March, with the panelists defending their work of choice. Books are voted off the list one at a time until the winner remains.

The Other 2010 Contenders:

Good to a Fault

Marina Endicott

Absorbed in her own failings, Clara Purdy crashes her life into a sharp left turn, taking the young family in the other car along with her. When bruises on the mother, Lorraine, prove to be late-stage cancer, Clara—against all habit and comfort—moves the three children and their terrible grandmother into her own house.

This compassionate, funny, and fiercely intelligent novel looks at life and death through grocery store reading glasses: being good, being at fault, and finding some balance on the precipice.

Fall On Your Knees

Ann-Marie MacDonald

The Piper family is steeped in secrets, lies, and unspoken truths. But there is one secret that threatens to shake their lives — even destroy them.

Set on Cape Breton Island off Nova Scotia, Fall on Your Knees is an internationally acclaimed multigenerational saga that chronicles the lives of four unforgettable sisters. Theirs is a world of ambition, inescapable bonds, and forbidden love.

Compellingly written, by turns menacingly dark and hilariously funny, this is an epic tale of five generations of sin, guilt, and redemption.

Generation X

Douglas Coupland

Andy, Claire, and Dag, each in their twenties, have quit "pointless jobs done grudgingly to little applause" in their respective hometowns and cut themselves adrift on the California desert. In search of the drastic changes that will lend meaning to their lives, they've mired themselves in the detritus of American cultural memory. Refugees from history, the three develop an ascetic regime of story-telling, boozing, and working McJobs--"low-pay, low-prestige, low-benefit, no-future jobs in the service industry." They create modern fables of love and death among the cosmetic surgery parlors and cocktail bars of Palm Springs, disturbingly funny tales of nuclear waste, historical overdosing, and mall culture.

The Jade Peony

Wayson Choy

Chinatown, Vancouver, in the late 1930s and '40s provides the backdrop for this poignant first novel, told through the vivid reminiscences of the three younger children of an immigrant Chinese family. The siblings grapple with their individual identities in a changing world, wresting autonomy from the strictures of history, family, and poverty. Mingling with life in Canada and the horror of war are the magic, ghosts, and family secrets of Poh-Poh, or Grandmother, who is the heart and pillar of the family. Side by side, her three grandchildren survive hardships and heartbreaks with grit and humour. Like the jade peony of the title, Choy's storytelling is at once delicate, powerful, and lovely.