Dual Citizens by Alix Ohlin is a finalist for the 2019 Scotiabank Giller Prize.

Dual Citizens tells the story of two sisters, Lark and Robin, whose intense co-dependent bond is cemented by their mother's wayward, selfish behaviour.

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 Dual Citizens below.

The story of Scottie's life — which is, of course, the story of my life too — begins with my sister Robin. It's strange how little we talk about it now. Of the three of us, I'm the only one who dwells on our history, probably because I'm the one who chose and formed it. If I bring up that day in the Laurentians, Robin says she doesn't remember much about it. I find this impossible to imagine. For me, the opposite is true, with every detail lodged unwaveringly in my memory, recorded in detail, like a film I can replay at any time.

It goes like this: a sunny day in June, the leafy heat of summer at odds with my frozen terror as I stood fixed to the ground. The air thick and still as a wall against Robin's ragged breath.

And the wolf my sister had named Catherine inspecting us both with her yellow eyes.

Robin was thirty-eight weeks pregnant at the time, and she'd just irritably informed me that pregnancy lasted ten months, not nine. She was angry about this, as if there had been a conspiracy to keep her misinformed. She was angry in general, because she was hot and uncomfortable and couldn't sleep. We were walking down a trail behind her house that led to a canopy of pine trees, hoping the air would be cooler there. Walking was all Robin wanted to do, although she complained about this, too: her hips hurt, her knees hurt, her ribs hurt. Complaining wasn't typical of my sister, who was stoically, even savagely independent, and it worried me. We stopped every few steps so she could catch her breath, and when we did, I watched her stroke her belly; she wasn't in other ways tender toward the baby inside her, or herself.

She frowned. "What are you doing?"

"Nothing."

"You're touching yourself," she said.

I hadn't realized until then that I was imitating her, making myself a mirror. My palm was flat against my own stomach, though there was nothing to stroke. I flushed with embarrassment, and my sister gave her harsh bark of a laugh.

"It's okay," she said. "I get it."

But how could she get it? She didn't live in my body any more than I could live in hers. We stood body to body, sister to sister, across an impossible divide.

To change the subject, I began telling her about a cache of old films that had been discovered in a permafrost landfill beneath an ice rink in Dawson City, Yukon. Dating from the early twentieth century, the films had belonged to a movie house. Back in those days, I said, movies traveled from California to cities like Calgary and Vancouver before heading to Whitehorse and eventually reaching the mining community in Dawson City, at which point it made no sense to ship them back to their point of origin. So they accumulated there, an accidental archive. The films were made of cellulose nitrate, a material known to disintegrate, melt, even spontaneously combust. If they hadn't been buried below the rink — nestled alongside chicken wire and dirt and bits of wooden debris — they might have burned the whole town down.

"Movies used to explode?" Robin said.

I nodded. I told her how the movie house went out of business and dumped the films, which were found decades later by a backhoe operator clearing the land for a new recreation center. The story fascinated me, with its unlikely combination of flammable film and icy bedrock, of preservation by neglect, how a town had maintained its history by forgetting it. Most silent films of that era have been lost to fire or decay, but abandonment saved these ones. As for my sister, she'd heard me go on about this kind of trivia for years — I was a collector of arcane information, especially anything relating to film — and I suppose she must have been used to it. She was listening now, so quietly that it took me longer than it should have to notice something was wrong.

This excerpt is taken from Dual Citizens, copyright © 2019 by Alix Ohlin. Reproduced with permission from House of Anansi Press Inc., Toronto. www.houseofanansi.com