Annotation:**WINNER** When Laura's father gets caught up in a swindle and pays with his life, she is forced to leave the comfort of North America to make a journey deep into the dangerous back streets and alleyways of the Lagos underworld to confront her father's killer. What she finds will change her life forever.

Annotation:**Short-listed title** Poignantly explores the manifold dangers and imperatives of making ourselves available to, and indeed responsible for, those dearest to us. Four complex characters travel from Montreal and New York to Hollywood and Rwanda, each of them with a consciousness that is utterly distinct and urgently convincing.

Annotation:**Short-listed title** Stories showing what happens when people's personal coping skills go awry. These are people who discover their anchor-chain has broken: characters safe in the world of self-deception or even self-delusion, forced to face the fact that their main line of defence has become their greatest weakness.

Annotation:Like his father before him, Octavio runs the Notre-Dame bakery, and knows the secret recipe for the perfect Parisian baguette. But, also like his father, Octavio has never mastered the art of reading and his only knowledge of the world beyond the bakery door comes from his own imagination. Just a few streets away, Isabeau works out of sight in the basement of the Louvre, trying to forget her disfigured beauty by losing herself in the paintings she restores and the stories she reads. The two might never have met, but for a curious chain of coincidences involving a mysterious traveller, an impoverished painter, a jaded bookseller, and a book of fairytales, lost and found . . .

Annotation:Cary Fagan began his writing career with the short story and now, after five novels, he returns to his first love. A woman leaves her husband, a retired judge, when he refuses to give up his passion for performing as a magician. A young man exiled from the downtown arts scene finds himself living in the suburbs in a community of new immigrants. A widow moves to New York to confront the woman who was her late husband's mistress. A bank manager in a bad situation turns to his childhood obsession with Jane Goodall for inspiration.

Annotation:The Erskine clan has lived in isolation on North Mountain for generations. Now, one man decides to come down off the mountain hoping to change the future for his brothers and sisters.

Annotation:"My life begins at the Y." So begins the story of Shannon, a newborn baby dumped at the doors of the YMCA. Bounced between foster homes, Shannon defines life on her own terms even as she longs to uncover her roots. The answers lie in the heartbreaking tale of her mother, a girl herself and one with a desperate fate.