The sensual story of Greek philosopher Aristotle and his tutelage of a young Alexander the Great has made the long list for the $50,000 Scotiabank Giller Prize and is a finalist for the $25,000 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize.

It's the only book to make both races this year, and the competition is stiff: The Giller long list, which will be narrowed to a short list on Tuesday, includes Margaret Atwood, and the Writers' Trust list of finalists includes Alice Munro.

"My odds are good, don't you think?" Lyon said with a chuckle in a recent phone interview from her home in New Westminster, B.C.

"I'm being sarcastic. I have no expectation of winning either of them because they are legends and I'm like a little mouse running around at the feet of the statue."

Lyon started writing "The Golden Mean" (Random House Canada) in 2001 after being highly influenced by Aristotle's writings during and after her philosophy studies at B.C.'s Simon Fraser University.

"Even after I left SFU and I left that degree behind and wasn't studying philosophy anymore, I did keep going back to his books and particularly his ethics," said Lyon, who has also published two collections of short fiction - "Oxygen" and "The Best Thing of You."

"I found that it was just something that I would pick up in times of stress and I would just turn to him and read him and dip in and read a few pages."

One of those times of stress was September 11, 2001, when terrorist attacks on New York City left her questioning her place in this world.

"I went through what I think a lot of people in the arts went through - I just wasn't quite sure of the importance of what I was doing, the relevance of what I was doing, and stopped reading fiction for a little while," said Lyon, who has a master's in creative writing from the University of British Columbia and now teaches an online creative writing course there.

"But I found that I could read my Aristotle because the questions that he poses there just remain so relevant and so current: 'What does it mean to live a good life, and what does it mean to avoid extremes, and what does it mean to be a good citizen?"'

Lyon's "fiction brain" then kicked in, and she decided to write about a period of Aristotle's life that many don't associate with him: His seven-year stint as a mentor to a young Alexander the Great in Macedonia.

Her goal, she said, was to keep as true to the historical record as possible and present Aristotle as somebody who was busy refining his ideas.

"I read all that I could about him - and there's not a lot that's known - and I read as much as I could by him, which was more revealing," she said. "And I finally kind of came to the conclusion that he was what today we might call bipolar."

Aristotle, she noted, seemed to know first-hand "about the relationship between what he called melancholy and the creative temperament," but also displayed "absolutely crazy, frenetic, intellectual activity."

"I thought, on the one side you have this manic brain that never seemed to stop, and then on the other side you have this person who seems to have understood what melancholy, his term, but what depression was," she said.

"So I conceived of him as being bipolar, and then when you read his ethics, he talks very much about 'The Golden Mean,' the title of my novel, seeking to find a sort of means between extremes as a way to live your life."'

Lyon's all-encompassing research and writing process became even more so when she had two children - the first in 2005, and the second in 2007.

While pregnant, she would go to the library in downtown Vancouver once a week to type passages. Her husband would also look after the kids while she wrote drafts.

"If it wasn't a project that I felt so passionate about, I don't think I could've done it," she said.

"Because at 10 o'clock at night when you've finally got the kids down and the house tidied up and got the teaching squared away and then you think: 'OK, now I have to sit down and write 150 words,' I would do that."

"But I don't think I could've done it for any other book. This was the one for me."