Please join WCA in congratulating Frances Itani and Padma Viswanathan on being longlisted for the $100,000 2014 Scotiabank Giller Prize!
Commonwealth Award winner Frances Itani is longlisted for her stunning new novel Tell (HarperCollins Canada, Grove US). A deeply moving and emotionally rich story about secrets withheld and revealed in the aftermath of the Great War, the novel is a companion to Itani’s unforgettable debut Deafening in that it picks up on the lives of two minor characters (Grania’s sister Tress and her husband Kenan), but it stands triumphantly on its own. Comparing her to the late Alistair MacLeod, the Toronto Star hails the novel as “masterful… evocative and indelible… an enthralling reminder of the toll the war – and all wars – take, not only on the soldiers but on the families who keep faith on the home front.” The Winnipeg Free Press, meanwhile, puts it more simply, stating that in Tell, “[Itani] illustrates that good storytelling is not dead.” Deafening, which has been published in 17 territories, was compared by reviewers to Birdsong and the Regeneration trilogy, and by writer Kaye Gibbons to the work of Grace Paley, Robert Lowell and W.H. Auden.
Internationally acclaimed New Face of Fiction author Padma Viswanathan has been longlisted for her latest bestselling novel The Ever After of Ashwin Rao, about the 1985 Air India bombing and the unexpected reverberations of this tragedy in the lives of its survivors. David Bezmozgis, author of The Betrayers calls it “An intrepid novel, its sadness leavened by a wry humour,”and Manil Suri, author of The Death of Vishnu raves “Through characters hewn with great empathy and grace, writing whose brilliance illuminates every page, and a story that constantly compels and surprises, Padma Viswanathan explores hugely ambitious questions of loss, identity and faith.” Her first novel The Toss of a Lemon was published to critical acclaim in Canada, Australia, Holland, Italy, Spain, Turkey, and the US, and was shortlisted for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award, and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best First Book Award (Canada and the Caribbean).