Boyden’s Through Black Spruce, a novel narrated by a Cree bush pilot in a coma and his niece, who has left the subarctic wilderness to find her missing sister in Manhattan, has won this year’s Scotiabank Giller Prize, which carries a C$50,000 cash award. The jurors were novelist Margaret Atwood, former Ontario premier Bob Rae, and Irish author Colm Toíbín, the first foreign judge in the prize’s 15-year history.