Tag: #Shortlist

Small Things Like These

A.M. Potter2 Comments

I was travelling for much of Fall 2025 and let my book reviewing lapse. Now that I’m back in Canada, here’s a favourite read from the past six months.

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan, 2021. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Irish Times Readers’ Choice for Best Irish Book of the Century.

Small Things Like These delivers storytelling at its finest. Not a wasted word.

Keegan’s 2021 novella is a masterpiece of tone and fidelity, powerfully evocative of life in Ireland. The tale is reminiscent of The Dead, a short story in James Joyce’s Dubliners. Both are Irish gems.

Sit in front of a hearth with a loved one and read Keegan’s book out loud to them.

2023 Giller Prize Windfall

A.M. Potter2 Comments

This year, I fell for two of the five books on Canada’s Giller Prize shortlist: All The Colour In The World by C.S. Richardson and Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton. “Only two?” you say. True. However, for me, two out of five is a windfall. Some years I don’t fall for any.

All The Colour In The World is fast-paced and atmospheric, more prose poem than traditional novel. Birnam Wood unfolds slowly (perhaps too slowly for some), delving deeply into its characters’ motivations. Set largely in Toronto, Richardson’s story deploys short evocative anecdotes; Catton’s relies on lengthy episodic portraits to spin a tale set in New Zealand’s South Island. While All The Colour In The World is a paean to memory and the power of art, Birnam Wood is primarily a novel of ideas, a crucible of eco-idealism, survivalism, and human striving.

Which one would I read again? Both of them.