Five novels are still in contention for the 2026 Giller Prize, Canada's richest award for fiction, and only one of them is a first book. On Monday the prize announced its shortlist: Tara Gereaux's Wild People Quiet, Michelle Good's Eliza Sunshine, Nicholas Herring's Your Breath in Charcoal, Nazanine Hozar's The Small Ones and Patmeena Sabit's Good People. "Unlike the other shortlisted authors who have had books published before, Sabit is a finalist for her debut work of fiction, Good People," CBC Books noted.
The winner receives $100,000 and each of the other finalists $10,000, according to the prize. The award will be presented on Monday, November 16, at a ceremony in downtown Toronto hosted by the comedian Rick Mercer and broadcast at 9 p.m. Eastern on CBC TV and CBC Gem.
The Debut
Good People follows the Sharaf family. As CBC summarized it, the Sharafs arrived years ago as refugees and worked hard to live in an affluent neighbourhood and send their children to the best schools. Then a horrific tragedy strikes the family, and people begin to wonder what is really happening behind their closed doors.
The family never tells its own story. The jury's citation, published by Penguin Random House, opens: "A polyphonic, layered, and brilliant debut novel, Patmeena Sabit's Good People is the story of the familiar, resilient, and stubbornly silent Sharaf family." It continues:
"Instead of telling their own story, it is left to a rotating cast of relatives, neighbours, friends, and even strangers to account for the Sharaf family's movements and motivations, chronicling the Sharafs' rise to success from desperate, distrusted refugees to members of the wealthy and exclusive gated community of Fairfax, Virginia."
The jurors close with the question the novel leaves open: "Are they victims of a tragic accident? Or are they the perpetrators of a terrible crime?" Crown published the book, and Amy Einhorn edited it, Penguin Random House said.
The Author
Sabit was born in Kabul, grew up in Virginia and now lives in Toronto, according to the Westport Journal. The Canadian Press, in a report carried by CityNews, called Good People her "debut national bestseller."
The Giller nod is not the book's first honour this fall. On September 24, the Westport Library in Connecticut named Good People the winner of its 2026 Westport Prize for Literature, which carries $10,000, the Westport Journal reported. The independent jury chose it over two other finalists, Ben Lerner's Transcription and Melissa Albert's The Children. The library plans to present the prize on November 12, four days before the Giller ceremony, with Sabit in conversation with Meghan O'Rourke, editor of The Yale Review.
In the library's announcement, Sabit described writing a book as an act of faith, and said that keeping that faith was one of the hardest parts of the years she spent on this one, with many moments when she came close to giving up. "So to have my work recognized in this way is incredible and deeply humbling and I couldn't be more grateful," she said.
The novel has drawn praise from other writers. The Westport Journal reported that Ann Patchett called it "a thrilling tour de force of a novel," and that Tommy Orange described it as a "gorgeous and powerful debut."
The Rest of the Field
None of the five has been a Giller finalist before; the Canadian Press described them as "five first-time finalists." But Sabit's rivals all have earlier books behind them.
Good, a Cree author and member of the Red Pheasant Cree Nation in Saskatchewan, is the only one the prize has recognized before, CBC said. Her debut novel, Five Little Indians, was on the 2020 Giller longlist and won Canada Reads in 2022. Eliza Sunshine follows three generations of Cree women. Herring, a fisherman and carpenter in Murray Harbour, Prince Edward Island, won the Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize for his first novel, Some Hellish; Your Breath in Charcoal, his second, follows a directionless Islander on a road trip from New Brunswick to Toronto. Hozar, who lives in Vancouver, followed her first novel, Aria, with The Small Ones, about children made to fight in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. Gereaux, a Regina-based citizen of the Metis Nation-Saskatchewan and the author of Saltus and Size of a Fist, set Wild People Quiet in 1940s Saskatchewan, where a Métis woman hides her identity in a mostly white town.
Who Chose Them
The shortlist was picked from more than 140 submissions by a jury of nine independent booksellers from across Canada. Penguin Random House noted that this is the first year the jury has been made up of independent booksellers. The Canadian Press reported that the prize, which parted ways with its former sponsor Scotiabank in February 2025, is now supported by a $4 million multi-year gift from the Hilary and Galen Weston Foundation.
Before the ceremony, the five finalists will appear together in the prize's Between the Pages events in Calgary on October 28, Ottawa on November 2, Halifax on November 4 and Toronto on November 13.
Sources: the Giller Prize, CBC Books, the Canadian Press via CityNews, Penguin Random House, the Westport Journal. Book descriptions are drawn from those reports and from the jury's citations.
Reported by the RedSquibble books desk from the publications and announcements linked in this story.
