Margaret Atwood: The Year of the Flood (McClelland & Stewart)

This long-awaited novel from Margaret Atwood is a brilliant visionary imagining of the future that calls to mind her classic novel The Handmaid’s Tale. A natural disaster has occurred obliterating most human life and altering Earth as we know it. Two women, Ren and Toby, have been spared and their stories unfold in this novel which brilliantly reflects to us a world we recognize but poignantly reminds us of our enduring humanity.

WINNER!!

Ian Brown: The Boy in the Moon (Random House Canada)

Walker Brown was born with a genetic mutation so rare that doctors call it an orphan syndrome: perhaps 300 people around the world also live with it. Walker turns twelve in 2008, but he weighs only 54 pounds, is still in diapers, can’t speak and needs to wear special cuffs on his arms so that he can’t continually hit himself. Told with tenderness and stark honesty, Ian Brown infuses his book with love for his amazing son, for his family and for life.

Alexandra Leggat: Animal (Anvil Press)

In a style reminiscent of Raymond Carver, the stories contained in Animal depict people on the brink of major life change. They stand at crossroads they are often oblivious to; they suck thick air in rooms filled with palpable tension. It matters little whether the characters take action or refuse to act; life acts for them. The reader is left to wonder: When does “meaning” cease to have meaning? Like travelling a mountain highway at night, what’s just around the next bend is never known. The stories in Animal never fail to deliver potent surprises.

Anne Michaels: The Winter Vault (McClelland & Stewart)

Anne Michaels’s first work of fiction in more than a decade, The Winter Vault is a stunning, richly layered, and timeless novel that is everything we could hope for - and more. Set in Canada and Egypt and with flashbacks to England and Poland after the war, it is a spellbinding love story that juxtaposes momentous historical events with the most intimate moments of individual lives.

Emily Schultz: Heaven is Small (House of Anansi Press)

Heaven is Small is the funny and profound story of Gordon Small, a degree-clutching slacker and failed fiction writer. Gordon is also, we discover in the first paragraph, recently deceased -- "an event he failed to notice." But when Gordon finds himself suddenly employed at the Heaven Book Company, the world's largest romance publisher, he does notice that things are odd. With sly deadpan humour, brilliant insight into the human condition, and exceptionally beautiful writing, Schultz explores what it's like to be truly alive only after you're dead.

Cordelia Strube: Lemon (Coach House Books)

Lemon has three mothers and one deadbeat dad. High school is a misery, a trial run for an unhappy adulthood of bloated waistlines, bad sex, contradictions and inequities, and nothing guidance counselor Blecher can say will convince Lemon otherwise. But making the choice to opt out of sex and violence and cancer and disappointment doesn’t mean that these things don’t find you. It will be up to Lemon if she can survive them with her usual cavalier aplomb.