Immigrant City by David Bezmozgis is a finalist for the 2019 Scotiabank Giller Prize.

Immigrant City is a short story collection about the contemporary Canadian immigrant experience. It features stories about a fighter working as a security guard in the Toronto suburbs, a father and daughter who end up in a strange rendition of his immigrant childhood and a young man who unwittingly makes contact with the underworld.

The Scotiabank Giller Prize gala will be hosted by Juno Award-winning singer-songwriter and star of the television series Jann, Jann Arden.

The ceremony will air on CBC, CBC Radio One and will be livestreamed on CBC Books.

Read an excerpt from Immigrant City below.

I have three daughters. One is a baby. One is seven and prefers to stay at home. One is four and wants to come with me wherever I go, even to the drugstore and the bank. If I don't take her, she cries.

Recently, backing out of a tight parking spot, I damaged the front passenger-side door of our car. I heard the sound of metal against concrete, the sound of self-recrimination, dolour and incalculable expense.

In the aftermath I called my wife, who was born in America and raised in mindless California abundance. For her family, scratching cars and misplacing wallets was like a hobby. I, on the other hand, had been an immigrant child, with all the heartache and superiority that conferred. We ate spotted fruit. I told my wife what I had done; her response was less than sympathetic.

I called the car dealership; I called a local body shop; I called a number tacked to a telephone pole. Then I called my uncle Alex, whose greatest fears were identity theft and getting a bad deal. He told me of a Serbian mechanic who, if you paid in cash and didn't ask any questions... I started dialing the Serb's number when I remembered the year was 2015 and the incompatibility of my uncle's fears. On a classifieds website I keyed in the make and model of my car door. Who knew? Didn't every kind of flotsam wash up on the blasted shores of the Internet, including a black 2012 Toyota Highlander front passenger-side door? Indeed, there one was, offered for sale by Mohamed Abdi Mohamed of Rexdale. In the accompanying photo, taken on an apartment balcony, the sun glinting off its immaculate finish, it looked just like my door before I'd mangled it. I sent Mohamed a text. He texted me back. I counter-texted. Soon we had a deal, consummated in texts.

There are a number of practical questions that could be posed at this point. Presume my wife posed and I answered them. However, there are many different considerations in life, and practical is a relative term. Perhaps buying a car door from a stranger on the Internet isn't the most practical decision, but I was viewing the thing in existential terms. I was asking: Who am I? How far have I strayed from my formative self ? What — ai, ai, ai — is the song of my soul?

The next morning, I prepared to go get my door. My wife needed the car for work, but that didn't deter me.

"How do you plan to get it home?" she asked. "Like an immigrant."

As I put on my shoes, Nora, my four-year-old, sidled up to me. "Where are you going, Papa?"

"To get the door."

We were in that aimless interval between the end of summer camp and the start of the school year. A nanny was looking after the baby, and the two older girls were either fighting or intertwined in front of the television, a lazy fan spinning overhead.

"I want to come with you," she said. "It's far," I said.

In anticipation of my answer, she made ready to cry.

I reflected: Wasn't this precisely the sort of trip my daughters needed? What did they know of the real world? While they ate take-out sushi, Syrian refugees were being tear-gassed by Hungarian cops, and Greek grandmothers, flayed by austerity, were walking off rooftops.

My oldest daughter resisted all coercion, so Nora and I set out on the journey by ourselves — first by streetcar through our gentrifying neighbourhood, then by subway to the end of the line, almost to the airport. By the last stop the train had nearly emptied out, leaving few representatives of white privilege. Those who remained looked pallid and desiccated, as if they'd been too weak to flee with the others.

At the station we boarded the number 45 bus that would take us up to Dixon Road. Nora is a particularly pretty child; old women are forever touching her face. On this bus too, where most everyone might have been a relation of Mohamed Abdi Mohamed's. Nora didn't mind. She is very companionable. A bearded man beside us was reading a book, which she misheard as being about the five pillows of Islam.

From the bus stop, it was not far to Mohamed Abdi Mohamed's address. On either side of the street rose apartment buildings, thrumming with life and larceny. There it was, my immigrant childhood.

This excerpt is taken from Immigrant City, copyright © 2019 by David Bezmozgis. Reproduced with permission from HarperCollins Canada, Toronto. https://www.harpercollins.ca/