Winner of the BMO Winterset Award

Winner of the NL Heritage and History Book Award for Fiction

Longlisted for the Dublin International Literary Award (IMPAC) 2017

Shortlisted for the Newfoundland and Labrador Book Award for Fiction

A Vancouver Sun Top Pick for 2015

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'This dense, complex work defies easy labels. The cover says “a novel,” but you’d swear it was a prose poem. Read deeper and see author and character share their last name. Is it a kind of memoir? All of the above?'...'Tilley doing Duke’s voice – repentant, unsure, dirty, loving – is one of the best ventriloquism acts you’ll come across lately.' -Jade Colbert, Globe and Mail

'For the avid reader, there’s nothing more refreshing than a book that reads like nothing you’ve read before. For its innovative structure and diction, Sara Tilley’s Duke is a very novel novel. It’s exciting to hold a book in your hands that is visibly busting out a brand new narrative form'...'the characters in this book – like the narrative structure – are dynamic, well-drawn, and memorably impressive.'-Chad Pelley, The Overcast

'A dense and challenging but wonderfully rewarding—and technically impressive—novel of (mostly) shuffled journal entries that date from June 30, 1893 to April 24, 1955, Sara Tilley’s sophomore effort had its roots in the Tilley family’s past. In her acknowledgements she mentions a 2004 visit to a property in Elliston, NL that her dad had inherited. After her father managed to pry open a stuck cupboard the two discovered “a mass of family letters, log books, postcards and ledgers, as well as magazines, school primers, medical texts and other documents dating back to the 1880s.” Composing “a work of fiction from those pages,” Tilley crafts a misadventure story, a dark family history, and a heroic tale of “Reckoning” that’s all the more affecting because it’s such a failure'…'Whatever the original found documents might have been, Sara Tilley has alchemized them and given her readers a fascinating, momentous, and complexly layered vision of the past. The novel’s a feat that any writer would be proud of and fans of literary fiction will enjoy.' -Brett Josef Grubisic, The Winnipeg Review

'Duke is a ground-breaking achievement — text-breaking, everything-breaking. It’s breathtaking.' -Joan Sullivan, The Telegram