Natalie Sue and David Huebert among finalists for $60K Amazon Canada First Novel Award
The prize recognizes the best Canadian debut novel of the year
Authors Natalie Sue and David Huebert are among the six finalists for the 2025 Amazon Canada First Novel Award.
The $60,000 award is a collaboration between Amazon Canada and The Walrus recognizing the best debut Canadian novel of the year. The remaining finalists will each receive $6,000.
Sue is nominated for her novel I Hope This Finds You Well, which follows Jolene, an anxious admin for Supershops, Inc., as she navigates a workplace of unsatisfactory colleagues.
Jolene copes with the frustrations of her office job through passive aggressive messages in emails that are never meant to be seen.
When she is caught and reprimanded, an IT mishap results in her having access to the confidential messages of her superiors. Can Jolene use this to the advantage of her career?
Sue is a Calgary-based writer of Iranian and British descent. I Hope This Finds You Well is her debut novel.
Huebert is shortlisted for Oil People, which is a novel set in southwestern Ontario, and weaves together two narratives and timelines to unravel family secrets and the toxic yet powerful nature of oil.
The novel tells the story of 13-year-old Jade Armbruster in 1987, who is living on the family's deteriorating oil farm, as her parents decide what to do about the land and their business.
Jade's teenage experiences are juxtaposed with the 1862 story of Clyde Armbruster, who built the oil farm, and the rivalry he develops with his neighbours.
Huebert is a Halifax-based writer who has won the CBC Short Story Prize and The Walrus Poetry Prize. He is the author of short story collections Peninsula Sinking, which won a Dartmouth Book Award and was a runner-up for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award, and Chemical Valley, which won the Alistair MacLeod Short Fiction Prize.
The other shortlisted authors are Quebec's Valérie Bah for Subterrane, B.C.'s Andrew Boden for When We Were Ashes, Alberta's Benjamin Hertwig for Juiceboxers and B.C.'s Myriam Lacroix for How It Works Out.
In Bah's Subterrane, Zeynab is working on a documentary on the margins of New Stockholm, a North American city. Cipher Falls is a polluted, industrial wasteland where artists and anti-capitalists are forced to work dead-end jobs to survive.
Zeynab focuses her documentary on Doudou Laguerre, an activist who mysteriously died — and the potential that his death had something to do with his dissent against a construction project.
Boden's We Were Ashes follows Rainor Schacht, who revisits his past as a child in a ward for disabled children in a remote hospital called Trutzburg in Nazi Germany.
Rainor sets out to find another survivor, Emmi, after discovering the kind bus driver's coded diary, and the two piece together their fragmented memories of a horrible place.
In Hertwig's Juiceboxers, Plinko is a 16-year-old undergoing basic training before finishing high school. When he moves in with an older soldier, he and the other roommates, people from all different backgrounds, build an unlikely friendship.
After 9/11, the military plans to go to war in Afghanistan so the young men are sent to the battlefields of Kandahar and are forever changed.
Lacroix's How It Works Out explores the hypothetical questions we often ask ourselves about relationships — what if we had taken a different job, moved to another city, or never met that person? The novel pushes these "what ifs" to the extreme: what if one of you were a power-hungry CEO and the other an employee, or even a reptile and a dog?
Through a series of surreal and vulnerable realities, one couple navigates countless alternate versions of their relationship.
The jury is composed of writers Jean Marc Ah-Sen, Liz Harmer, Chelene Knight and Shani Mootoo.
The winner will be announced at an in-person award ceremony in Toronto on June 5, 2025.
Last year's winner was Alicia Elliott for And Then She Fell.
Other past winners include Stéphane Larue for The Dishwasher, Joy Kogawa for Obasan, katherena vermette for The Break, Michelle Good for Five Little Indians, Anne Michaels for Fugitive Pieces and Madeleine Thien for Certainty.
