Annal:2005 National Book Award for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the National Book Award in the year 2005. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 2005 NBA–Fiction winner
- 2005 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 16.55
In Europe Central, Vollmann presents a mesmerizing series of intertwined paired stories that compare and contrast the moral decisions made by various figures—some famous, some infamous, some unknown—associated with the warring authoritarian cultures of Germany and the USSR in the twentieth century. He conjures up two generals, one Russian and one German, who collaborate with the enemy for different reasons and with different results. Another pairing tells of two heroes—a female Russian partisan martyred at the beginning of World War II and a young German…
The March: A Novel
- 2006 PEN-faulkner winner
- 2005 NBCC–Fiction winner
- 2006 Pulitzer–fiction finalist
- 2005 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- 2005 NBA–Fiction finalist
- Score: 38.56
In 1864, after Union general William Tecumseh Sherman burned Atlanta, he marched his sixty thousand troops east through Georgia to the sea, and then up into the Carolinas. The army fought off Confederate forces and lived off the land, pillaging the Southern plantations, taking cattle and crops for their own, demolishing cities, and accumulating a borne-along population of freed blacks and white refugees until all that remained was the dangerous transient life of the uprooted, the dispossessed, and the triumphant. Only a master novelist could so powerfully and…
Veronica: A Novel
- 2005 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- 2005 NBA–Fiction finalist
- 2005 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 18.55
As a teenager on the streets of San Francisco, Alison is discovered by a photographer and swept into the world of fashion-modeling in Paris and Rome. When her career crashes and a love affair ends disastrously, she moves to New York City to build a new life. There she meets Veronica—an older wisecracking eccentric with her own ideas about style, a proofreader who comes to work with a personal “office kit” and a plaque that reads “Still Anal After All These Years.” Improbably, the two women become friends. Their friendship will survive not only Alison’s reentry…
Trance: A Novel
- 2005 NBA–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.55
1974: A tiny band of self-styled urban guerrillas, calling itself the Symbionese Liberation Army, abducts a newspaper heiress, who then abruptly announces that she has adopted the guerrilla name “Tania” and chosen to remain with her former captors. Has she been brainwashed? Coerced? Could she be sincere? Why would such a nice girl disavow her loving parents, her adoring fiancé, her comfortable home? Why would she suddenly adopt the SLA’s cri de coeur, “Death to the Fascist Insect that Preys Upon the Life of the People”? Soon most of the SLA are dead, killed in a…
Holy Skirts: A Novel
- 2005 NBA–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.55
In 1917 no one had ever seen a woman like the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. She regally stalked the streets of Greenwich Village wearing a bustle with a flashing taillight, a brassiere made from tomato cans, or a birdcage necklace; declaimed her poems to sailors in beer halls; and enthusiastically modeled in the nude for artists such as Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp, setting the city ablaze with her antics. Before today’s outsized celebrities, there was the Baroness—poet and artist, proto-punk rocker, sexual libertine, fashion avatar, and troublemaker. At…
