Happy to See “All the Broken Things” Up for the Toronto Book Award

Pleased to see a 2014 Canadian novel I loved reading is now avail in the US, @KKuitenbrouwer “All the Broken Things.”—http://t.co/tu1WBN872J

— Philip Turner (@philipsturner) August 24, 2015

Nice to hear @KKuitenbrouwer‘s All the Broken Things touted for Toronto Book Award& @EmilyMandel‘s Station Eleven. 2 faves @CBCHereandNow.

— Philip Turner (@philipsturner) August 25, 2015

As readers of my blogs may recall, I enjoy circus novels and fiction about the carney world, with books by Robertson Davies, Angela Carter and Ellen Hunnicutt among my longtime favorites. Here’s a post on that world called “Life is a Carnival.” One literary highlight I discovered last year is Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer’s All the Broken Things, a resonant and beautifully written novel about a teenage immigrant to Canada from Vietnam who befriends an animal trainer and becomes a carnival’s star attraction wrestling the troupe’s bear. I wrote about the book here on my other site, The Great Gray Bridge. Earlier this week, I was pleased to read that the book is now officially available in the US.

A day later, I was delighted to see the book is a finalist for the Toronto Book Award, along with another novel I enjoyed very much, the apocalypse-tinged, yet gentle, Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel. Here’s a screenshot from Shelf Awareness showing all the finalists. The winner will be named at a public event hosted by CBC Radio’s Gill Deacon at the Toronto Reference Library’s Bram and Bluma Appel Salon on Oct. 15.