The big national book prizes, the Giller and GG, really screwed it up this year, overlooking probably the best novel published in Canada in 2009: Struan Sinclair's Automatic World (Doubleday Canada). Infinitely complex, it's endlessly rewarding.

Other terrific novels from this fair land?

Mike Blouin's Chase and Haven (Coach House Books), about a brother and sister trying to survive and transcend adversity, is a beautifully sympathetic portrait of the strength and failures of sibling love.

Totally different is Lemon (Coach House Books) by Cordelia Strube. The title character, a troubled teen with a big mouth and a bleeding heart, is one of the most vivid fictional creations I've encountered in a while.

(I've just started reading Kaspoit! by Dennis E. Bolen, Anvil Press. It's a hard-boiled story told almost entirely through dialogue: "I tuck away my ordinance like it was treasure." So far, so good.)

Gerry Kopelow called his book of 1960s photographs All Our Changes (University of Manitoba Press). He could have called it All Yesterday's Parties. It's a fond recollection of a time when a Che Guevara T-shirt wasn't ironic.

I was knocked sideways by the verbal gymnastics I came across in the poems of Jeramy Dodds. You can find a whole bunch of them in his stellar collection Crabwise to the Hounds (Coach House Books).

George Sprott (1894-1975) (Drawn & Quartered), by Seth, is an oversized graphic fictional biography of a local cable-television star. It's a delightful paradoxical nostalgia trip to a Canada that I'm sure never really existed.

Alexandra Leggat writes brief, mysterious stories. The ones in Animal (Anvil Press) sometimes seem unfinished, but that only adds to their creepy allure.

On the other hand, the stories collected in Nocturnes (Knopf Canada), by Kazuo Ishiguro, are lengthy and lush. The man is a master craftsman.

Broken Wing, Falling Sky (Turnstone Press), Fran Muir's memoir of her late mother and their struggles with the B.C. health-care system, is harrowing. It's also an act of love and a touching reminiscence.

I confess that Nick Cave, the man who recorded duets with PJ Harvey and Kylie Minogue - on the same album - can do little wrong as far as I'm concerned. His novel The Death of Bunny Munro (Harper Collins) affirms my faith: it's filthy, funny and effing smart.

And William Trevor's Love and Summer (Knopf Canada), about a brief encounter in mid-century rural Ireland, is a perfect jewel of a novel. Trevor is a global treasure.