Prizes

Winner of Governor General's Award 1966

A Jest of God holds a special place for me... I found it an almost perfect book, in that it did what it set out to do, with no gaps and no excesses. Like a pool or a well, it covers a small area but goes down deep... plain, self-contained, elegant in form, holding within it the essentials of life' -- Margaret Atwood
Authentic and powerful. The dialogue is full of nice ironies and the narrative finely paced * TLS *
It's not hard to see why its female readers welcomed and cherished it... this is not a feel-good book but Rachel is portrayed with exceptional insight and subtlety which feel relevant still' * Sunday Herald *
Laurence remains, for many readers, the defining conscious of 20th-century Canadian literary fiction as well as a major influence on Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood. It is easy to see why... This stylistically sophisticated narrative [is] tender and sympathetic but never sentimental' * Irish Times *

Margaret Laurence (1926-1987) grew up in the small prairie town of Neepawa, Manitoba, Canada. Recognised as one of the greatest Canadian writers, her masterwork is the Manawaka sequence of five novels of which A Jest of God is the second.