Annal:1983 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the year 1983. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
Schindler's Ark: (Schindler's List)
- 1983 LATimes–Fiction winner
- 1982 Booker winner
- Score: 20.33
Schindler’s List is a remarkable work of fiction based on the true story of German industrialist and war profiteer, Oskar Schindler, who, confronted with the horror of the extermination camps, gambled his life and fortune to rescue 1,300 Jews from the gas chambers.
Working with the actual testimony of Schindler’s Jews, Thomas Keneally artfully depicts the courage and shrewdness of an unlikely savior, a man who is a flawed mixture of hedonism and decency and who, in the presence of unutterable evil, transcends the limits of his own humanity.
- 1983 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.33
The year is 1327. Franciscans in a wealthy Italian abbey are suspected of heresy, and Brother William of Baskerville arrives to investigate. When his delicate mission is suddenly overshadowed by seven bizarre deaths, Brother William turns detective. His tools are the logic of Aristotle, the theology of Aquinas, the empirical insights of Roger Bacon—all sharpened to a glistening edge by wry humor and a ferocious curiosity. He collects evidence, deciphers secret symbols and coded manuscripts, and digs into the eerie labyrinth of the abbey, where “the most interesting things happen at night.”
- 1983 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.33
A mysterious and haunting tale of romance and murder, that begins with the marriage of a man and a woman in love. But when he inexplicably mistreats his beloved on the night of the wedding, he is in turn murdered by her brothers, and we are left with a strange sense of inevitability and passions gone terribly awry.
The Little Drummer Girl: A Novel
- 1983 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.33
John le Carré has earned worldwide acclaim with novels that navigate the shadow worlds of espionage. In The Little Drummer Girl, one of his most enduring works, le Carré took leave of the Circus, George Smiley, and all his people, and presented instead an original canvas that remains, two decades later, stunningly fresh and topical. It was then, and is now, a thrilling, moving, and courageous novel of Middle Eastern intrigue.
Charlie is a promiscuous, unsuccessful, English actress in her twenties. Vacationing on the Greek island of Mykonos with…
