How to Pronounce Knife by Souvankham Thammavongsa

His pages light up all around falls into darkness. His third appearance on the Giller shortlist – including the 2005 winner, The Time in Between – affirms Bergen among Canada’s most powerful writers. Sexual loneliness and moral confusion pull at the delicately wrought characters in David Bergen’s latest work, a story collection of masterly skill and tension. A young woman in a puritanical religious community glimpses the coloured world outside, and must choose whether to close her eyes, or to run. A fishing boat sputters to a halt off the coast of Honduras, compelling its owner to decide the fate of his repellent client. Jury CitationĪ dying woman asks an aging rancher to become her last lover. In 2018, he was given the Writers’ Trust Matt Cohen Award: In Celebration of a Writing Life. He won the Giller Prize for his novel The Time in Between. His work has been nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Impac Dublin Literary Award, and a Pushcart Prize. Drawing richly on both the Western and on gothic fiction, Adamson evokes a mythic landscape to frame the question: how is it possible to live a good life, when obedience to man-made laws is so at odds with love, loyalty and respect for the natural world?ĭavid Bergen has published eight novels and a collection of short stories. The proximity of this new type of outlaw presents an existential threat to young Jack, who takes refuge in his parents’ abandoned shack with a price on his head after escaping the toxic hypocrisies of ‘civilisation’. The long-awaited sequel to Gil Adamson’s hit The Outlander moves the action forward a decade, returning the 13-year-old son of the original protagonists to a forested land into which prisoners of the first world war are now hewing roads. She is also the author of a collection of linked stories, Help Me, Jacques Cousteau, and two poetry collections, Primitive and Ashland.

It was a finalist for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, CBC Canada Reads, and the Prix Femina in France longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and chosen as a Globe and Mail and Washington Post Top 100 Book. Gil Adamson is the critically acclaimed author of The Outlander, which won the Dashiell Hammett Prize for Literary Excellence in Crime Writing, the Amazon.ca First Novel Award, the ReLit Award, and the Drummer General’s Award.

How to Pronounce Knife by Souvankham Thammavongsa