The Winner of the Scotia Bank Giller Prize to be Announced October 30.12. Introducing the Short List Finalists:

Inside
Author:  Alix Ohlin
Summary:  "When Grace, an exceedingly competent and devoted therapist in Montreal, stumbles across a man who has just failed to hang himself, her instinct to help kicks in immediately. Before long, however, she realizes that her feelings for this charismatic, extremely guarded stranger are far from straightforward. In the meantime, her troubled teenage patient, Annie, runs away from home and soon will reinvent herself in New York as an aspiring and ruthless actress, as unencumbered as humanly possible by 
any personal attachments. And Mitch, Grace’s ex-husband, who is a therapist as well, leaves the woman he’s desperately in love with to attend to a struggling native community in the bleak Arctic. We follow these four compelling, complex characters from Montreal and New York to Hollywood and Rwanda, each of them with a consciousness that is utterly distinct and urgently convincing. With razor-sharp emotional intelligence,Inside poignantly explores the many dangers as well as the imperative of making ourselves available to—and responsible for—those dearest to us." (from GoodReads)

Whirl Away
Author:  Russell Wangersky
Summary:  "In his new short story collection, Whirl Away, Russell Wangersky—author of critically-acclaimed fiction and non-fiction including The Glass Harmonica, Burning Down the House: Fighting Fires and Losing Myself and The Hour of Bad Decisions— looks at what happens when people’s personal coping skills go awry. These are people who discover their anchor-chain has broken: characters safe in the world of self-deception or even selfdelusion, forced to face the fact that their main line of defense has become their greatest weakness." (GoodReads)


Ru
Author:  Kim Thuy

Summary: "Ru. In Vietnamese it means lullaby; in French it is a small stream, but also signifies a flow - of tears, blood, money. Kim Thúy's Ru is literature at its most crystalline: the flow of a life on the tides of unrest and on to more peaceful waters. In vignettes of exquisite clarity, sharp observation and sly wit, we are carried along on an unforgettable journey from a palatial residence in Saigon to a crowded and muddy Malaysian refugee camp, and onward to a new life in Quebec. There, the young girl feels the embrace of a new community, and revels in the chance to be part of the American Dream. As an adult, the waters become rough again: now a mother of two sons, she must learn to shape her love around the younger boy's autism. Moving seamlessly from past to present, from history to memory and back again, Ru is a book that celebrates life in all its wonder: its moments of beauty and sensuality, brutality and sorrow, comfort and comedy." (Amazon.ca)

The Imposter Bride
Author:  Nancy Richler
Summary:  When a young, enigmatic woman arrives in post-war Montreal, it is immediately clear that she is not who she claims to be. Her attempt to live out her life as Lily Azerov shatters as she disappears, leaving a new husband and baby daughter, and a host of unanswered questions. Who is she really and what happened to the young woman whose identity she has stolen? Why has she left and where did she go? It is left to the daughter she abandoned to find the answers to these questions as she searches for the mother she may never find or really know." (GoodReads)

419

Author:  Will Ferguson

Summary:  "From internationally bestselling travel writer Will Ferguson, author of Happiness™ and Spanish Fly, comes a novel both epic in its sweep and intimate in its portrayal of human endurance.

A car tumbles through darkness down a snowy ravine.
A woman without a name walks out of a dust storm in sub-Saharan Africa.
And in the seething heat of Lagos City, a criminal cartel scours the Internet, looking for victims.
Lives intersect. Worlds collide. And it all begins with a single email: “Dear Sir, I am the daughter of a Nigerian diplomat, and I need your help…”
Will Ferguson takes readers deep into the labyrinth of lies that is “419,” the world’s most insidious Internet scam.
When Laura Curtis, a lonely editor in a cold northern city, discovers that her father has died because of one such swindle, she sets out to track down—and corner—her father’s killer. It is a dangerous game she’s playing, however, and the stakes are higher than she can ever imagine.
Woven into Laura’s journey is a mysterious woman from the African Sahel with scars etched into her skin and a young man who finds himself caught up in a web of violence and deceit.
And running through it, a dying father’s final words: “You, I love.” (Amazon.ca)

This is the short list for the Scotiabank Giller Prize.  One of these five will be announced the winner during the 2012 Scotiabank Giller Prize broadcast on CBC Television at 9:00 p.m. EST/ 9:30 p.m. NT (Northwest Territories) on Tuesday, October 30, 2012.  The winning prize is $50,000 and each finalist will receive $5000.  

The celebrity presenters are as follows:

• Rick Mercer introducing Will Ferguson and his novel, 419
• TBA introducing Alix Ohlin and her novel, INSIDE
• Kim Cattrall introducing Nancy Richler and her novel, THE IMPOSTER BRIDE
• Measha Brueggergosman introducing Kim Thúy and her novel, RU
• Allan Hawco introducing Russell Wangersky and his collection of short stories, WHIRL AWAY

http://www.cbc.ca/books/scotiabankgillerprize/explore-the-2012-shortlist.html