Within a page Thien has moved to the in-between past. But Li-ling begins her tale in 1989, when she was 10 and living with her mother it’s the year her father “left us twice the first time to end his marriage, and the second, when he took his own life.” The opening is graceful, seductive and emblematic of the entire novel: people have more than one identity, and nothing ever happens just once. The narrator, who goes by both her Chinese name, Li-ling, and her Western name, Marie, is now a math professor at Simon Fraser University. The story starts in Vancouver, its opening pages telling of dislocation both psychic and physical. MORE: Thien’s essay on the life of a writer Time moves forwards, backwards and even sideways throughout, all with the aim, Thien says, that anyone reading “who lived through those experiences sees a true echo of their times.” Do Not Say We Have Nothing plays-in the best sense-with history and memory in extraordinarily delicate fashion. She told reporters today that just being named to the shortlist made her “burst into tears.” The GGs were influential in what she read when young, she said, shaping what she “imagined about Canadian literature.” Thien’s intense focus on history is on display in the book that prompted the accolades. 25-American author Paul Beatty took it for The Sellout-but the 42-year-old Thien did scoop up Canada’s most tradition-rich book prize earlier in the day.įor Thien, whose novels have all moved between present and past, the GG’s layers of history made it particularly appealing. Madeleine Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing, one of the most acclaimed novels of the year, may not have won the Man Booker Prize on Oct.

It’s not at all a bad day when the $25,000 Governor General’s Literary Award for fiction is only one of the prizes on offer on a given date.

Do not say we have nothing analysis