Dear Fellow Readers,
The New Year is upon us, and Knopf Canada and Random House Canada are proud to present the sixteenth season of our New Face of Fiction program. From its inception, the NFoF has been all about one thing: bringing spectacular first-time Canadian novelists to readers. We've launched the careers of many beloved authors who are now familiar names, and many have gone on to become critically acclaimed award-winners or national and international bestsellers. Ann-Marie MacDonald, Yann Martel, Mary Lawson, Gail Anderson-Dargatz, Dionne Brand, Timothy Taylor, Nicolas Dickner, Jessica Grant and Ami McKay all had their first novels launched as part of the NFoF program.
Every year our editors choose first novels for the program based on the high quality of the writing and the storytelling. We look for writers who reveal something of Canadian life or of the human soul. Since we have such a great tradition to uphold, we are very selective. And we're very proud to present to you the two novels that we believe live up to, even surpass, our expectations for 2012:
Kim Thúy's powerful and poetic novel Ru is already a runaway bestseller in Quebec, won the 2010 Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction in French, and has been sold in 15 territories. Now, with an exquisite translation by Sheila Fischman, English readers can revel in this special book - at once a lullaby for Vietnam and a love letter to a new homeland. Ru tells the story of a young girl's journey from a palatial residence in Saigon to a crowded and muddy Malaysian refugee camp, and onward to a new life in Quebec. We couldn't be more proud to share with readers Kim Thúy's unique voice and her effervescent charm. It's worth noting, too, that the jacket for this book is stunning - and absolutely unmissable in the stores since Ru was announced as the first Heather's Pick of 2012. Fantastique!
With Grace O'Connell's highly anticipated debut novel, a literary star is born! This stunningly gifted young writer has been publishing short fiction and winning writing prizes for years and she's not yet 30. With prose both intelligent and surprising and deep emotional content, Magnified World draws you in from the first pages, dramatizing the battle between the head and the heart and the limitations of both in unlocking something as complex as loss.
We hope you'll want to pick up or download a copy of each of this year's NFoFs, and while you're on the NFoF site, take some time to look at the fantastic novels that have been included in the NFoF list over the whole sixteen years (click here for the complete list).
The Publishers of the Knopf Random Canada Group
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