Intersex

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, by Stieg Larsson (Penguin Canada, $32), the third book in the Lisbeth Salander trilogy, has pretty well ruled the top of the bestseller lists since it came out this summer, and the trilogy as a whole captured many readers. With the help of her friend, journalist Mikael Blomkvist, Salander has to prove her innocence in this instalment.

Kathryn Stockett's The Help (Amy Einhorn Books/Putnam, $27.50) has been on bestseller lists for most of 2010. It's a novel about white children being raised by black women in the south in the 1960s. Stockett tackles the serious subject of racism in the southern United States with humour and courage.

The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson (Bloomsbury, $18.50) won the 2010 Man Booker Prize. This tragicomic novel is about Julian Treslove, a former BBC radio producer, and Sam Finkler, a Jewish philosopher, writer and television traits. The two are old friends, and the story follows the pair as well as their former teacher Libor Sevick.

Ian McEwan's Solar (Knopf Canada, $32), a satirical novel about climate change, features an all-too-human protagonist whose antics, at times, will make readers laugh out loud.

Gary Shteyngart's novel Super Sad True Love Story (Random House, $26) is a dystopian modern-day 1984. In his vision, the United States is bankrupt and illiterate. Books are "smelly and annoying," everyone lives online, all the time, and Canada has been renamed Stability-Canada.

The Vancouver Sun's reviewer wrote that Freedom by Jonathan Franzen (HarperCollins, $34.99) is a "superb confrontation of the family construct and the illusion of liberty. Written with a heavy hand and edited with a light one, it is correctly being called the year's required North American literature."

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell (Knopf Canada, $32), set in 1799, is about a junior clerk for the Dutch East India Company who is stationed in Japan. One reviewer wrote that "Mitchell's energetic storytelling is hard to resist, and he manages, in quieter moments, to meditate on the mystery of the Orient without falling for its clichés."

Emma Donoghue's Room (HarperCollins, $29.99) is narrated by a five-year-old boy who has never left the tiny shed in which he was born and in which he and his mother are confined. The book has received numerous award nominations and is a Canadian bestseller.

Secret Daughter by Shilpi Somaya Gowda (HarperCollins, $19.99) is the story of a baby girl, born in India, who is adopted by an American couple. Author Gowda was born and raised in Toronto by parents who had emigrated there from Mumbai, but she now lives in Texas.

The Sentimentalists by Johanna Skibsrud (Gaspereau Press, $27.95) is the surprise winner of this year's Scotiabank Giller Prize. The novel had only a inadequate release by Gaspereau Press, but Vancouver publisher Douglas & McIntyre secured a deal in November to print enough copies of the book so that people can get their hands on it for Christmas.

Annabel by Kathleen Winter (House of Anansi Press, $32.95), about an "intersex" child who is being raised as a boy in backwoods Labrador, landed on the nomination lists for all three of Canada's major book prizes: the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Writers' Trust Award, and the Governor General's Literary Award.

Fishtailing by Wendy Phillips (Coteau Books, $14.95) is a one-of-a-kind book written for teens entirely in verse. Phillips won a Governor General's Award for this, her first novel.