Reading By Lightning by Joan Thomas (Goose Lane Editions, 2008) has won the 2009 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book in the Caribbean and Canada region. The regional winners were announced on March 11 in Kingston, Jamaica. Reading by Lightning is a Bildungsroman of great wit and depth; wry and intimate, this story of Lily Piper tells us something of how we can make sense of a future when the future is some-thing we can hardly imagine.

The prize covers the four Commonwealth regions: Africa, the Caribbean and Canada, Europe, South Asia and South East Asia and Pacific. In each of the four regions a £1000 prize was awarded to the Best Book. (The four Best Book winners will then compete for the overall £10,000 Commonwealth Prize.)

JOAN THOMAS has been a regular book reviewer for the Globe and Mail for more than a decade. Her works have been published in numerous journals and magazines including Prairie Fire, Books in Canada, and the Winnipeg Free Press. She has won a National Magazine Award, co-edited Turn of the Story: Canadian Short Fiction on the Eve of the Millennium, and has served on the editorial boards of Turnstone Press and Prairie Fire magazine. She lives in Winnipeg. Visit Goose Lane Editions.