The Man Booker Prize is an annual award given to the best work of fiction in the British Commonwealth and Ireland. Alison Pick’s Far to Go is one of three Canadian books recently long-listed for the 2011 Booker, a great honour which was just the incentive I needed to pull it out of my towering to-be-read pile. I’m very glad I did. Pick’s story held me firm in its grip from the first sentence to the last, her characters as real to me as my next-door neighbours.
