There are many reasons to love the Canada Reads winner this year. For starters, Kim Thúy’s poetic and powerful novel was selected by the CBC radio contest from a series of books all centred around race – an issue preoccupying the country.
For another, it puts the spotlight on one of the country’s most gifted writers, who – though the book was shortlisted for the 2014 Giller Prize – is not necessarily that well known across Canada. Winning Canada Reads will surely change that.
But most importantly, it’s a superb book, uniquely styled in a series of short chapters. Each of them stands on its own as a stunning piece of writing but taken together, they form a coherent yet dreamy narrative tracing the experience of a young girl who leaves her home in Vietnam after the 60s civil war to come to Montreal.
Read it now.
