The Buzz...About Books

On October 5, at the Toronto Book Awards 2021 ceremony, Mayor John Tory praised Toronto's "endless supply of great stories". This sentiment was echoed by Kim Echlin as she accepted the award saying, "In Toronto, we keep working together to know each other's stories and to give each other safe shelter for these stories." Her novel Speak, Silence is about the rapes of thousands of Bosnian women during the war and a Toronto journalist who becomes involved with the effort to make their stories public. Dory Cerny's review in Quill & Quire called it "an incredibly forceful book that insists readers sit up and pay attention."  

Speak, Silence by Kim Echlin

The other finalists were:

Æther: An Out of Body Lyric by Catherine Graham 

Crosshairs by Catherine Hernandez

Missing from the Village: The Story of Serial Killer Bruce McArthur, the Search for Justice, and the System that Failed Toronto's Queer Community by Justin Ling

On Property by Rinaldo Walcott

Swimmers in Winter by Faye Guenther