The shortlist for this year’s Giller Prize is once again filled with historical novels, and almost obsessed with a rural sensibility that has dominated Canadian literature over the past few years. Philip Marchand doesn’t see anything wrong with that perspective, but “I still wondered if, in our literary culture, a work of fiction set in present-day Toronto was somehow regarded as a bit trivial. A good writer who carefully observed contemporary life always ended up sounding satirical, and to some people satire was Not Serious. Better to have these soulful looks at the past, at a way of life that was vanishing. That was real literature.”