Annal:1982 National Book Award for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the National Book Award in the year 1982. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 1982 NBA–Fiction winner
- 1981 Pulitzer–fiction finalist
- 1980 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 22.32
On an Illinois farm in the 1920s, a man is murdered, and in the same moment the tenous friendship between two lonely boys comes to an end. In telling their interconnected stories, American Book Award winner William delivers a masterfully restrained and magically evocative meditation on the past. “A small, perfect novel.”—Washington Post Book World.
- 1982 NBA–Fiction winner
- 1982 Pulitzer–fiction winner
- 1981 NBCC–Fiction winner
- Score: 30.32
The hero of John Updike’s Rabbit, Run (1960), ten years after the hectic events described in Rabbit Redux (1971), has come to enjoy considerable prosperity as Chief Sales Representative of Springer Motors, a Toyota agency in Brewer, Pennsylvania. The time is 1979: Skylab is falling, gas lines are lengthening, the President collapses while running in a marathon, and double-digit inflation coincides with a deflation of national confidence. Nevertheless, Harry Angstrom feels in good shape, ready to enjoy life at last—until his son, Nelson, returns from…
Ellis Island and Other Stories
- 1982 NBA–Fiction finalist
- 1982 PEN-faulkner finalist
- 1981 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- Score: 18.32
Marshall Pearl is orphaned at birth aboard an illegal immigrant ship off the coast of Palestine in 1947 and brought as an infant to America. Determined to see the world in its beauty, ferocity, and ultimate justice, he does so, in scenes of gorgeous color and great excitement, as a child in the Hudson Valley, fighting the Rastafarians in Jamaica, at Harvard, in a slaughterhouse on the Great Plains, in the Mexican desert, on the sea, and in the Alps. Finally, he is drawn to Israel to confront the logic of his birth in a crucible of war, magic, suffering, and…
- 1982 NBA–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.32
“The first of my father’s illusions was that bears could survive the life lived by human beings, and the second was that human beings could survive a life led in hotels.”
So says John Berry, son of a hapless dreamer, brother to a cadre of eccentric siblings, and chronicler of the lives lived, the loves experienced, the deaths met, and the myriad strange and wonderful times encountered by the family Berry. Hoteliers, pet-bear owners, friends of Freud (the animal trainer and vaudevillian, that is), and playthings of mad fate, they…
- 1982 LATimes–Fiction winner
- 1982 NBA–Fiction finalist
- 1982 PEN-faulkner finalist
- 1982 Pulitzer–fiction finalist
- 1981 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 34.32
An emotional, dramatic and philosophical novel about Americans drawn into a small Central American country on the brink of revolution.
Dad: A Novel
- 1982 NBA–Fiction finalist
- 1981 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- Score: 12.32
John Tremont, a middle-aged man with a family, is summoned to his mother’s bedside after she has suffered a heart attack. When he arrives, he finds her shaken but surviving: it is his father, left alone, who is unable to cope, who begins to fail, to slip away from life. Joined by his nineteen-year-old son, John suddenly becomes enmeshed in the frightening, consuming, endless minutiae of caring for a beloved, dying parent. He also finds himself inescapably confronting his own middle age, jammed between his son’s feckless impatience to get on with his life and his…
- 1982 NBA–Fiction finalist
- 1980 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 12.32
It is America in the great depression, and he is a child of that time, that place. He runs away from home in Paterson, New Jersey, to New York City and learns the bare bones of life before he hits the road with a traveling carnival. Then one icy night in the Adirondacks, the young man sees a private train roar by. In its lit windows, he spies an industrial tycoon, a poet, a gangster, and a heartbreakingly beautiful girl. He follows them, as one follows a dream, to an isolated private estate on Loon Lake.
Thus the stage is set for a spellbinding tale of…
- 1982 NBA–Fiction finalist
- 1980 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 12.32
Morgan Gower works at Cullen’s hardware store in north Baltimore. He has seven daughters and a warmhearted wife, but as he journeys into the gray area of middle age, he finds his household growing tedious. Then Morgan meets two lovely young newlyweds under some rather extreme circumstances—and all three discover that no one’s heart is safe….
