August into Winter by Guy Vanderhaeghe is a finalist for the 2021 Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize.

The winner of the $60,000 prize will be announced on Nov. 3, 2021.

August into Winter takes place in 1939 in a world on the brink of global war. After Constable Hotchkiss confronts the spoiled, narcissistic Ernie Sickert about the disturbing pranks in their small Prairie town, Ernie commits an act of unspeakable violence. What follows is a course of events that will change many lives forever.

Guy Vanderhaeghe is a novelist, short story writer and playwright. His debut short story collection, Man Descending, published in 1982, earned him the Governor General's Literary Award for fiction and later Faber Prize in Britain. He would go on to win two more Governor General's Literary Awards: in 1996, for the novel The Englishman's Boy, and in 2015, for the short story collection Daddy Lenin and Other Stories. His novel The Last Crossing won Canada Reads 2004 when it was defended by musician Jim Cuddy.

You can read an excerpt from August into Winter below.

The Winnipeg Evening Tribune, March 29, 1939

SPANISH REPUBLICAN AWAITS RECOGNITION

MONTREAL, March 29 — Deme Rio Cuetara, acting consul‑general here for the Spanish republican government, has refused to surrender his offices and documents to representatives of General Franco until Canada recognizes the Spanish nationalist regime.

One blustery, rainy evening in the spring of 1939 Mr. and Mrs. Turcotte, upstanding citizens of the town of Connaught, returned from a card party at the home of friends and discovered a half‑eaten cheese sandwich abandoned on the kitchen counter. After a short discussion, they determined that neither one of them had left it there and presumed that a hobo looking for a handout had knocked and, failing to get a response and finding the door unlocked, had entered the house and made free with their icebox. Then, hearing them at the front door, he had bolted out the back.

Neither of them bothered to ask why the intruder hadn't scampered with the sandwich. A quick inventory of household goods showed nothing of value missing. The Turcottes secured their doors for the first time in twenty years and turned in. With so many men hungry, out of work, riding the rails, a purloined cheese sandwich was hardly a case for the police.

Two weeks later something happened that was definitely a case for the police. Two elderly spinster ladies, the Middleton sisters, showed up in a highly agitated state on the doorstep of their neighbour Mrs. Sickert. In breathless whispers, they disclosed that they had found something shocking and indecent in their home when they returned from church. Mrs. Sickert's adult son, Ernie, who lived at home with his mother, was immediately sent to fetch the RCMP.

The Middleton ladies gave a detailed statement to Constable Alfred Hotchkiss and Corporal James Cooper, demurely blushing as they alternated excited outbursts with tongue‑tied silences. The gist of it was that while they had been attending St. Andrew's United Church somebody had been playing Silly Billy with their unmentionables. The officers went next door to investigate, leaving the Middleton sisters to be solaced by Mrs. Sickert.

—

The sisters shared a bedroom. On each of the twin beds a stiff corset was posed. On one of the ladies' pillows a queen of clubs was neatly centred and on the other a queen of spades, royalty from a deck of risqué poker cards that featured naked pin‑up girls wearing nothing but sultry pouts and a lot of shocking‑red lipstick on their nipples.

Nodding to one of the corsets, Constable Hotchkiss said, "Pecker tracks," and in return got a look of warning from Corporal Cooper. Ernie Sickert, the etiolated young man who had brought them news of the break‑in, had appeared out of nowhere. He was wearing what had become a uniform for him, grey flannel trousers, starched white shirt, and mulberry bow tie. Tall and so lanky that he verged on emaciation, Sickert had both hands up on the top of the door frame from which he hung like human drapery. An elaborate stack of towering pompadour crowned his narrow head, a hairdo that he had adopted during his days when he had played tenor sax for the Rhythm Alligators, a local dance band. Ernie had an expectant air, an I'm‑preparing‑ to‑lick‑ice‑cream look on his face.

Excerpted from August into Winter by Guy Vanderhaeghe. Copyright © 2021 Guy Vanderhaeghe. Published by McClelland & Stewart, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.