(This was the Canada Reads finalist about five years ago, and I've been meaning to get to it ever since. There really is hope for your TBR pile! Also, this was way better than the novel that actually did win that year.)

It's something of an educational/social problem novel, which follows a group of Tamil refugees who arrive in Canada by boat, and run smack into the Harper Government's anti-immigrant rhetoric. The point of view characters are one of the refugees (a widowed single father) including flashbacks to his life in Sri Lanka, a Tamil-Canadian law student who is roped into the case despite wanting to focus on corporate law, and the Japanese-American adjudicator appointed by the Tories to paint the Tamils as terrorists and deport them. Excluding the flashbacks, the story takes place over about a year, between the arrival of the boat and the final admissibility hearing, and spends about equal time on the process and the motivations of the three main characters involved. The author would like us to know that the process is profoundly borked.

There are a lot of conflicting agendas and motivations from everyone, which mostly worked for me, but I did find the adjudicator a bit of a straw man at times. (The level of subtlety on the go is the minister for public safety being named after the Canadian famous for denying Jews asylum during the Holocaust, and the adjudicators kids doing a project on Japanese Internment). However, the character voices were excellent, with a lot of room for humour amidst all the lingering trauma and graphically-described war crimes. I did like that the novel had an open ending, where each character had shifted their perspective enough over the course of the story that the outcome felt both uncertain, and full of possibilities not seen at the start.

One of the better social problem novels I've read, and I can see why it was popular at the time. Sadly, it remains immensely topical today.