Amazon.ca: First Novel Award

Past Winners

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About the Judges

Stuart Woods

Stuart Woods is the editor of Quill & Quire, Canada's magazine about the book trade.

Joan Thomas

Joan Thomas is a Canadian novelist, whose first book, Reading by Lightning, won the Amazon.ca First Novel Award in 2008 and the Commonwealth Prize for Best First Book (Canada and the Caribbean). Her second novel, Curiosity, was recently nominated for the ScotiaBank Giller Prize. She resides in Winnipeg.

Cynthia Good

Cynthia Good has been in the publishing industry for over thirty years, most notably as the first editorial director of Penguin Canada. Following her years at Penguin, she became fiction-editor-at-large for Walrus Magazine, consulted for a variety of public and private organizations, and taught writing and publishing workshops at several universities and colleges. She is currently Director of The Creative Book Publishing Program at Humber College.

Jo Steffens

Jo Steffens, a Calgary native, is currently the General Director of the Calgary WordFest. Prior to joining the Wordfest, she was a curator at The Municipal Art Society (MAS) in New York and founded the Independent Booksellers of New York City with Sarah McNally. She was also the editor of Unpacking My Library: Architects and Their Books, an intimate look at the personal libraries of twelve of the world’s leading architects.

35th Annual Amazon.ca First Novel Award Winner: Eleanor Catton for The Rehearsal

Amazon.ca congratulates Eleanor Catton, winner of the 35th annual Amazon.ca First Novel Award for The Rehearsal. Head judge Stuart Woods--editor of the award's co-presenter, Quill & Quire magazine--called the book "everything a first novel ought to be: bold, inventive, self-possessed. The novel, which follows the aftermath of a sexual scandal at a private school, is unlike any coming of age story you’re likely to encounter, offering keen insight into the worlds of high art, music, and theatre while brilliantly decoding the rituals of adolescent life. In the hands of a less talented writer, The Rehearsal could easily have become a tiresome experiment, but Catton has imbued every page, every paragraph, with wit and insight."

›Read more about The Rehearsal

35th Annual First Novel Award Finalists

Ghosted by Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall		The Rehearsal by Eleanor Catton
Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall received plaudits and some notoriety for his first book, Down to This, which recounted the year he spent living among the homeless in Toronto’s now-defunct Tent City. It’s not a stretch to assume that the experiences that informed the earlier work have spilled over into his first book of fiction. Mason Dubisee, the novel’s 30-year-old protagonist, is not actually homeless, but he is a frustrated writer who has spent the last five years spinning in a vortex of alcohol and cocaine abuse and gambling debts. His cousin Chaz has found him a place to live in Toronto’s Chinatown, but also keeps him on a steady diet of drugs that impedes Mason’s ability to pay the rent. When Mason is offered several thousand dollars to write what turns out to be a suicide note, he senses an opportunity...		The plot is conventionally provocative: in the aftermath of a high school sex scandal, a group of teenage girls become aware of their own power. However, in The Rehearsal, the first novel by Canadian-born, New Zealand-raised Eleanor Catton, the plot is not the point. Throughout the novel, Catton obscures the line between reality and fantasy. A group of drama students decide to use the recent sex scandal as fodder for their end-of-year production. The novel’s chapters alternate between the drama students’ points of view and those of a group of girls loosely connected to the scandal, but it’s never entirely clear whether the latter scenes are actual events or merely the students’ re-enactments of them...
• Read more about Ghosted		• Read more about The Rehearsal

Ilustrado by Miguel Syjuco		Annabel by Kathleen Winter
When the body of Crispin Salvador – “the Panther of Philippine Letters” – is found bobbing in New York City’s Hudson River, Miguel, Salvador’s biographer, is convinced of foul play. After all, Salvador, who spent the last several years exiled in New York after a fall from grace with critics in his homeland, was on the cusp of completing the masterpiece that promised to revive his reputation and “return him to the pantheon.” Now, the manuscript, which was meant to reveal the unscrupulous malevolence of the Filipino ruling class, has gone missing. And so Miguel books a flight to Manila in search of answers. But Ilustrado is not a crime novel. It’s an illustrious, evocative, intricate story that chronicles 150 years of Philippine history by employing a wide array of narrative mechanisms...		When Jacinta Blake gives birth in the bathtub of her house in the village of Croydon Harbour, her close friend Thomasina is the first to notice that the newborn possesses a combination of male and female parts. Thomasina begins to refer to the baby as Annabel, in tribute to her own lost daughter, who died along with her father in a boating accident. But Jacinta’s husband, Treadway, an outdoorsman and trapper, decides he wants to raise a male heir. The child is christened Wayne and taken to Goose Bay General Hospital for an operation designed to render him more convincingly male... Experiencing a confusing identification with femininity from early boyhood, Wayne grows up an outsider, and eventually relocates to St. John’s, where he struggles to take greater control of his body and identity...
• Read more about Ilustrado		• Read more about Annabel

Cool Water by Dianne Warren
Juliet, Saskatchewan, is a blink-of-an-eye kind of town--the welcome sign announces a population of 1,011 people--and it’s easy to imagine that nothing happens on its hot and dusty streets. Situated on the edge of the Little Snake sand hills, Juliet and its inhabitants are caught in limbo between a century--old promise of prosperity and whatever lies ahead. But the heart of the town beats in the rich and overlapping stories of its people, stories that bring the prairie desert and the town of Juliet to vivid and enduring life. This wonderfully entertaining, witty and deeply felt novel brims with forgiveness as its flawed people stumble towards the future.
• Read more about Cool Water

Recent Winners & Nominees

2006: Madeleine Thien, Certainty

2005: Joseph Boyden, Three Day Road

2004: Colin McAdam, Some Great Thing

David Elias, Sunday Afternoon
Ibi Kaslik, Skinny
Arthur Moyer, What's Remembered
Catherine Safer, Bishop's House