Indian author Aravind Adiga, whose book The White Tiger won the 2008 Booker Prize. (Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images)

Spies! Lawsuits! Layoffs! Scandal! Bloodletting! Feuds! While this might read like the plot outline for the latest John Grisham page-turner, it’s actually a recap of some of the shenanigans and stranger-than-fiction events that rocked the publishing industry in 2008.

This year was rockier than most for literature. With two nail-biting elections and an economic downturn setting the tone, the year in books was characterized by a mood of uncertainty – about sales, the definition of a short story, support for Canadian arts and culture, the fate of the publishing industry and exactly how book jurors go about selecting a prizewinner.

Somewhere in the midst of all of this sturm und drang, authors found time to take home some awards and craft some pretty staggering sentences.

Things started out on an upbeat (or perhaps, chest-thumping) note, with Carl Wilson’s in-depth examination of all things Celine Dion, Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, garnering great reviews. Then, Paul Quarrington’s affectionate look at an aging hockey legend, the previously out-of-print King Leary, got a second lease on life when it was named winner of Canada Reads 2008.

(HarperCollins)

There was more rejoicing in the spring, when playwright Claudia Dey published Stunt, a striking, surreal debut novel that signalled her arrival as a major new voice in CanLit. But no one’s words carried more weight in early ’08 than Lawrence Hill’s. Riding a wave of momentum and critical acclaim that began in 2007, his gripping historical slave narrative The Book of Negroes netted several prizes, including a Writers Trust Award for fiction and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for best book. The author’s triumphs continued when he was invited to meet one ardent fan of his work, the Queen.

Hill wasn’t the only novelist to take home trophies. Mumbai author Aravind Adiga won the coveted Man Booker Prize for his debut The White Tiger, while Nino Ricci’s evolutionary novel The Origin of Species was awarded the Governor General’s Literary Award for fiction. But it was Joseph Boyden who had the most to crow about, when his novel Through Black Spruce scooped up the Scotiabank Giller Prize, beating out the critical darling favoured to win, Rawi Hage’s masterly, anguished Cockroach.

The existential tone of Hage’s book felt appropriate in a year punctuated by some tragic losses in the book world. Alain Robbe-Grillet, an avant-garde French novelist and scriptwriter, died on Feb. 18. The science fiction world mourned the March 19 passing of Sir Arthur C. Clarke, the prolific, visionary author best known for 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Michael Crichton, another writer with a knack for parlaying scientific innovations into great fiction, succumbed to cancer on Nov. 4, while Pulitzer Prize-winning author Studs Terkel, the oral historian who devoted himself to chronicling the lives of ordinary Americans, passed away on Oct. 31. Yet the greatest outpouring of grief was reserved for the brilliant David Foster Wallace. On Sept. 12, news of his suicide began to spread across Facebook pages and, before long, writers who’d been inspired by Foster Wallace’s bold, post-post-modern works, were holding vigils in his name.

This year, the normally staid Canadian literary community turned downright snarky. Jacob Sheier, the Toronto poet who received a Governor General’s Literary Award for his debut book of poetry, More to Keep Us Warm, barely had time to bask in the GG afterglow before finding himself in the midst of a genuine literary scandal. When word got out that Scheier had ties to two of the three jurors who voted for his work, the ensuing hue and cry prompted a call for more transparency in the jury process for Canadian literary prizes.

Perhaps Scheier should commiserate with Jane Urquhart, who must still be stinging from the cranky reception she received as editor of The Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories. Teaming up for two special editions jointly titled the Salon des Refuses, the editors at Canadian Notes and Queries and The New Quarterly published the 20 short stories they considered glaring omissions from Urquhart’s collection, and derided the novelist’s decision to “open up” the definition of a short story by including excerpts from memoirs in her Penguin anthology. The feud did have one upside, in that it inspired some Canadians to start treating the short story genre with the respect it has always deserved.

(Crown Publishing Group)

There were still some people in 2008 that chose to make love, not war. Toronto’s Russell Smith reissued his erotic novel Diana: A Diary in the Second Person, while south of the border, John Updike received a lifetime achievement award for the numerous bad sex scenes he has conceived over the years. The admission by Barbara Walters that she once had an affair with a married man helped her memoir, Audition, become an instant bestseller. Meanwhile, Lolita, a book that still inspires fire in the loins of many a reader, turned 50.

As voters wondered if an Alaskan vice-presidential candidate who was rumoured to be in favour of banning books could really make it to the White House, presidential hopeful Barack Obama found time during his campaign to publish two memoirs that are still riding high on the New York Times list as of this writing. The tension over who would become president mounted, and David Sedaris, who had a sensational year with his latest, When You Are Engulfed in Flames, took time out from book tours to weigh in with a New Yorker piece that promptly went viral.

Meanwhile, a controversial election issue was brewing much closer to home. After already making drastic cuts to arts and culture funding, Prime Minister Stephen Harper committed a major gaffe on the election campaign trail when he publicly declared that “ordinary people” don’t care much about the arts. The comment drew the ire of no less than the grande dame of CanLit, Margaret Atwood, who delivered a beautifully argued smackdown to Harper in her Globe and Mail article To be creative is, in fact, Canadian.

She was just getting warmed up. As Americans were riding a wave of “Yes, We Can!” sentiment leading up to Obama’s presidential win, the U.S. economy was in free fall. It was Atwood who had the first word again, in her uncannily timed non-fiction book, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth. Assembled in book form, her prescient Massey Lectures offered a lively, intellectual study of debt as a construct and examined our culture of overspending.

By December, the economic downturn showed little sign of improving, and major U.S. publishing houses were among those who paid the steepest price. That left anxious fiction lovers up in Canada to ponder a year that held more questions than answers: Was the future of books in self-publishing? Or online? Did e-readers from Kindle and Sony really live up to the hype? And with diminished book sections in newspapers across the country, who would review the 2009 crop of CanLit?

The future, as yet, is unwritten, but before we start sounding any death knells for fiction, it’s worth noting that 2008 ended with good news. Canadian book sales have actually increased since this time last year. Cash cow J.K. Rowling is back with a vengeance. And if the literary spats of the past year are any indication, there are still plenty of people out there who believe good books are worth fighting for.

Lee Ferguson writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.