Annal:1981 National Book Award for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the National Book Award in the year 1981. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 1981 NBA–Fiction winner
- 1979 Pulitzer–fiction winner
- 1978 NBCC–Fiction winner
- Score: 30.31
Here are sixty-one stories that chronicle the lives of what has been called “the greatest generation.” From the early wonder and disillusionment of city life in “The Enormous Radio” to the surprising discoveries and common mysteries of suburbia in “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill” and “The Swimmer,” Cheever tells us everything we need to know about “the pain and sweetness of life.”
- 1981 NBA–Fiction winner
- Score: 10.31
“Nowhere in [Morris’s] fiction does emotion emerge from detail so beautifully as in this precise and vivid book.…The triumph of the book, in terms of craft, is that we experience the sense of the slow passage of time so necessary to such a story.…The heart of the book is its tactful rendering of the emotional history of several women.…Precise, satisfying, and complete.”—New York Times Book Review.
“This is a beautiful, subtle novel that accomplishes the rare effect of presenting history from the inside out.…As the title suggests, this is a melody…
- 1980 NBCC–Fiction winner
- 1981 NBA–Fiction finalist
- 1981 PEN-faulkner finalist
- Score: 22.3
The Transit of Venus is considered Shirley Hazzard’s most brilliant novel. It tells the story of two orphan sisters, Caroline and Grace Bell, as they leave Australia to start a new life in post-war England. What happens to these young women—seduction and abandonment, marriage and widowhood, love and betrayal—becomes as moving and wonderful and yet as predestined as the transits of the planets themselves. Gorgeously written and intricately constructed, Hazzard’s novel is a story of place: Sydney, London, New York, Stockholm; of time: from the fifties to the…
The Second Coming: A Novel
- 1980 LATimes–Fiction winner
- 1981 NBA–Fiction finalist
- 1981 PEN-faulkner finalist
- 1980 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 28.3
Will Barrett, a lonely widower, suffers from a depression so strange and severe that he decides he doesn’t want to continue living. But then he meets Allison, a mental hospital escapee making a new life for herself, living alone in a greenhouse. What follows is by turns touching and zany, tragic and comic, as Will goes in search of proof of God and winds up finding much more.
- 1979 NBCC–Fiction winner
- 1981 NBA–Fiction finalist
- Score: 16.29
In 1798, Irish patriots, committed to freeing their country from England, landed with a company of French troops in County Mayo, in westernmost Ireland. They were supposed to be an advance guard, followed by other French ships with the leader of the rebellion, Wolfe Tone. Briefly they triumphed, raising hopes among the impoverished local peasantry and gathering a group of supporters. But before long the insurgency collapsed before a brutal English counterattack.
Very few books succeed in registering the sudden terrible impact of historical events; Thomas…
- 1981 NBA–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.31
Follows the various members of the Henry family as they become involved in the events preceeding America's involvement in World War II and captures all the drama, romance, heroism, and tragedy of the Second World War.
