Six Star Magazine Six Star Magazine 2012 | Page 13

phrase than action, plot or character
development. There is a lot of focus on
how things look and sound, and this
is one of the strengths of the novel;
the author’s ability to capture the slow
moments in life where one can really think
about the meaning of grief, the purpose
of family and the concept of home.”
Currently residing in Tucson, Arizona,
Joanna is working on a second novel.

2009 The Bishop’s Man,
Linden MacIntyre
Son of a Port Hastings,
N.S. miner, MacIntyre is
perhaps the most well
known of the Giller
winners. Since 1990 he
has been co-host of CBC’s
weekly newsmagazine
,
and is a frequent guest host of The
Current on CBC Radio One. The Bishop’s
Man is the second in his Cape Breton
trilogy (see article on driving the Cape’s
Cabot Trail). Why Men Lie completed
the trilogy in 2012.
The book is set in the mid-to-late 1990s.
Father Duncan MacAskill, a 50 year-old
former university dean and Honduran
Catholic missionary, has run afoul of church
authorities. As punishment, his bishop
Maris, in tiny Creignish located in southern
Cape Breton Island. The book deals with
issues priests face in today’s society.
“His new assignment proves less a
homecoming than spiritual crossroad,”
comments the Globe and Mail. “In the
lonely glebe house of that tiny rural
parish, MacAskill encounters the cold
hard facts and consequences of the life
he has lived, both in the priesthood and
in growing up as the son of local drunk,
and in the process discovers for himself

the solace of alcohol as a substitute for
a church whose foundations seem to be
moving out from under him.”

2008 Through Black Spruce,
Joseph Boyden
Of Irish, Scottish and Métis
descent, Joseph Boyden
writes about First Nations
heritage and culture. His
second novel, Through
Black Spruce follows the
story of Will, son of one of the characters
in Three Day Road
novel about two Cree soldiers serving in
the Canadian military during World War I.
His second novel was also inspired by
Ojibwe Francis Pegahmagabow, the
legendary First World War sniper.
The titles are part of a planned trilogy,
the third of which is forthcoming.
(josephboyden.com)
Boyden grew up in Willowdale,
Ontario and attended the Jesuit-run
Brebeuf College School. Boyden’s father,
Raymond Wilfrid Boyden, was a medical
George VI personally awarded him
the Distinguished Service Order and
proclaimed him as the highest-decorated
“I’m forty years old, the third youngest
of eleven children born into a strict Irish
Catholic family,” recalls Boyden. “My
age betrays the fact that my father sired
a number of my siblings, including me,
when he was quite a bit older than most
fathers. I grew up with history and myth
swirling around me, stories of my father’s
war exploits and my uncle Erl’s Ojibwe
ways inseparable. My father was blond
and blue-eyed. Erl was brown and
high-cheekboned and had a hooked
nose. I was born into a family from a
very different era.”

11

Boyden studied creative writing at
Orleans, and subsequently taught in the
Aboriginal Student Program at Northern
College. He divides his time between
Louisiana, where he and his wife, Amanda
Boyden, are writers in residence, and
Northern Ontario.
Other Giller winners of note are:

2007 Late Nights on Air,
Elizabeth Hay
In this story, Harry Boyd,
a failed Toronto television
refugee, returns to a
small radio station in
Yellowknife. Set in the
summer of 1975, he falls
in love with a voice on air, Dido Paris,
just part of a cast of highly eccentric
characters.

2006 Bloodletting & Miraculous
Cures, Vincent Lam
Bloodletting, a series of