Q host Jian Ghomeshi, left, with Nicolas Dickner, holding book, translator Lazer Lederhendler, back, and Michel Vézina, who defended Nikolski in CBC's Canada Reads debate this week. (CBC)

A winner has been chosen in CBC Radio One's Canada Reads series, in which a celebrity jury votes for a single book it can recommend to all Canadians.

Spoiler alert: the next paragraph reveals the winner.

Nikolski, by Quebec writer Nicolas Dickner, is the winning book. Originally published in French, it was released in English in 2009 in a translation by Lazer Lederhendler, and won the Governor General's Award for French-to-English translation.

The book is about three characters living in a Montreal neighbourhood whose lives run parallel but never quite intersect.

"They live in the same environment every day without knowing each other. In urban environments now, we live without knowing our neighbours," said Michel Vézina, the Quebec cultural critic and writer who defended the book.

"This is the only book that talks about the complexity of the world we live in now and the global complexity we all face," he said.

The Canada Reads winner was revealed at noon ET after a week of debate, but many followers of the book battle prefer to hear the rebroadcast in their own time zone before they learn the winner.

Vézina has been an advocate for the book since it was published in French in 2005, Dickner told CBC News.

"He's brilliant," Dickner said of Vézina. "I wouldn't have anyone else but him to defend this book."

Dickner said he is "absolutely thrilled" with his Canada Reads win. The book had only modest sales in anglophone Canada, despite many good reviews when it first came out.

Being a Canada Reads contender made a big difference in interest in the book, but the winner has the biggest benefit from the "Canada Reads effect."

Last year's winner, The Book of Negroes, topped bestseller lists for weeks. By Dec. 1, The Book of Negroes had sold more than 400,000 copies in Canada, and was one of the top-selling Canadian novels ever.

Young people feeling 'trapped'

Dickner said he followed Canada Reads blog posts and the Twitter feed, but couldn't bring himself to tune in for the debate about the book, his first novel.

"I can be oversensitive to the blows that are aimed at my book," he said.

Dickner said his book is about people learning how they want to live in the modern world.

"The novel is about young people who grew up basically feeling trapped within their parents' way of living, way of thinking and decisions," he said.

"That is pretty much everyone's case, but they maybe had more pain than most people and when they leave their house or trailer or bungalow … they have to learn slowly who they are, what do they want. It's the first time in their lives that they've been allowed to make their own decisions and it's not easy to make your own decisions when you've been making family-based decisions for a long time."

He set the novel in the Little Italy neighbourhood of Montreal where he once lived, a place he said impressed him with its sense of harmony. But he's never been to the other places that figure in book — Venezuela, the Prairies and the small Alaskan town of Nikolski.

Dickner describes the Montreal he knows as "a very dense cocktail of cultures, of immigration of several languages mixing together."

He said the discussion of whether the novel was "Canadian" struck him as hilarious.

"In my idea it was much more a North American novel than a Canadian novel," he said.

'Draw the attention of the reader'

One criticism by some of the panellists was that he used a non-linear form of storytelling and the book sometimes seemed "disjointed." Dickner said he believes people are used to that "polyphonic" form of storytelling from the movies.

"You start writing without any assumptions about what you're supposed to do and I was experimenting a lot," he said.

"You can do whatever you want as long as you can draw the attention of the reader."

The Canada Reads debate aired this week on CBC Radio One and podcasts are available on the Canada Reads website.

The other contenders were Fall on Your Knees by Ann-Marie MacDonald, The Jade Peony by Wayson Choy, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture by Douglas Coupland and Good to a Fault by Marina Endicott.