Mg vassanji the book of secrets review

Sixteen years ago, the Giller Prize was just an interesting idea. Canadian book review readers were certainly familiar with the name of the late Doris Giller, from her work in both Montreal and Toronto; her husband, Jack Rabinovitch, had established Canada’s richest fiction prize ($25,000) in her memory.

It is probably fair to say that in the days leading up to the first prize announcement more attention was paid to Jack’s other “prize” gesture — it would be announced at an invitation-only dinner in Toronto’s ritzy Four Seasons Hotel ballroom.

The Giller is now firmly established, not just in Canada, but globally. And an invite to that dinner from which the prize ceremony is now nationally televised is one of the most sought after honors in Canada’s literary and reading community.

One reason for all of the attention to the dinner rather than the books was that the original shortlist did not feature a book from a Canadian