MONTREAL -- Toronto writer Linda Spalding, who won the 2012
Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction on Tuesday, agrees
that novels like hers might make history more interesting for
people who say they don't know much about the past.    "For me,
to understand why a man who is an abolitionist would buy a slave
-- and I know that historically is true because it happened to
my great-great-great grandfather -- to understand how he would
have come to that, I had to go through a huge amount of
searching and reflection myself," she said Tuesday.  "That,
hopefully, is what a reader will do."  Spalding said one of the
key things she learned in writing the book was how to apply her
research gingerly because she wasn't writing a textbook.  The
jury said Spalding's "The Purchase" was "refreshingly free of
retrospective judgment."  Writing the book was no easy task.
"It was very challenging," Spalding said in an interview moments
after she picked up the $25,000 prize at a ceremony on Tuesday.
"I thought I understoo