Published in the University of Toronto Press's “Cultural Spaces” series, Prizing Literature looks at four Canadian authors (Michael Ondaatje, Carol Shields, Rohinton Mistry, and Yann Martel) whose immigrant or cosmopolitan backgrounds have complicated their national identities and whose fame has been significantly enhanced by major non-Canadian literary awards. The subject overlaps, to some degree, with Lorraine York's Literary Celebrity in Canada, published four years earlier also by the University of Toronto Press, which – in addition to examining Margaret Atwood – also discusses Michael Ondaatje and Carol Shields, and Roberts measures her conclusions repeatedly against York's.

The title of Prizing Literature is, however, neither entirely accurate (surely the adjective “Canadian” is crucial?) nor does it do justice to the documentary and interpretive richness of Roberts's study, which goes well beyond a study of “The Celebration and Circulation of National Culture.” The book does indeed offer a great deal of information on various national and international awards as they pertain to the four authors in question, but Roberts complements this information with attentive analyses that carry these extraliterary questions into the narratives themselves. What, for example, is the meaning of cosmopolitanism and national identity to the characters in In the Skin of the Lion, The English Patient, and Anil's Ghost? What is these characters' understanding of the ambivalent geographies and linguistic categories they inhabit? How is this ambivalence expressed in the range of critics' sometimes contradictory readings of these works? How does Minghella's romantic film version of The English Patient change Ondaatje's understanding of his characters' cosmopolitan identity? This last discussion in particular illustrates the continuing relevance of Roberts's approach because, with the success of Ang Lee's film of The Life of Pi, comparable questions could also be asked about that very popular adaptation and one is eager to know how Roberts would answer them. In other words, this study always leaves the reader with the conviction that, although their literary life was significantly shaped by these factors, the narratives are always more than products of “celebrity and circulation.”

While the Introduction and a few sections of the subsequent chapters are a little congested with dutiful references to Derrida, Bourdieu, Appiah, Genette, Kant, et al., and therefore overly reminiscent of the doctoral thesis that was the origin of this book, the narrative hits its stride soon enough with its truly impressive research into the media coverage of the four authors' prize history, and Roberts's methodical and lucid account of it. The result could easily be a catalogue of sources but more than once reveals itself as a significant alternative to related criticism that is not based on such painstaking research and detailed reading. Thus Roberts corrects a reading of Daisy's “various dislocations” in The Stone Diaries, by pointing out that “the experience of dislocation [in fact] goes unrepresented” (99). Elsewhere, she offers textual proof that the academics in Swann “detract from the context of Canadian literature” rather than forcing Swann's work into it: “Sarah's use of survival diverges from Atwood's: in contrast to Atwood's diagnosis of Canadian literature's fixation with victimhood and survival, Sarah is concerned with the positions of survivor and victim for women in no particular national context” (114). Or, in analyzing Ondaatje's Canadian identity in the “Aftermath” of his Booker Prize win, Roberts cites both Canadian and British publications to underline increasing confusion about the author's cultural passport. In doing so, she challenges another critic's conclusion that Ondaatje's fame was unquestioningly accepted as both national and international.

In a few instances, the argument is more cursory than one would like. For example, the controversy over Yann Martel's possible plagiarism of Moacyr Scliar's Max and the Cats was rather more complex than Roberts's brief account of it illustrates. Prizing Literature is a relatively short book, and a somewhat fuller background history discussing Western writers (such as Daphne du Maurier) suspected of plagiarizing postcolonial authors would have been appropriate and welcome. Likewise, Lawrence Hill's The Book of Negroes may not have repeated its Canadian best-seller success in the United Kingdom, but – once its title had been changed to Someone Knows My Name – it became a popular success in the United States. The index, by the way, does as little justice to the book as does the title. While there is an enormous entry on “hospitality,” there is none on Moacyr Scliar, and other names and terms cited in this densely researched book also go without mention. Here the press economized in the wrong place.

There is no doubt, however, that Prizing Literature is an informative, well-written and thought-provoking book that will be a valuable addition to any Canadian studies bookshelf.