Annal:1984 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the National Book Critics Circle Award in the year 1984. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 1985 LATimes–Fiction winner
- 1984 NBCC–Fiction winner
- Score: 20.35
The first book in Louise Erdrich’s Native American series, which also includes The Beet Queen, Tracks, and The Bingo Palace, Love Medicine tells the story of two families—the Kashpaws and the Lamartines. Now resequenced by the author with the addition of never-before-published chapters, this is a publishing event equivalent to the presentation of a new and definitive text. Written in Erdrich’s uniquely poetic, powerful style, Love Medicine springs to raging life: a multigenerational portrait of new truths and secrets whose time has come, of…
- 1984 NBA–1st Novel winner
- 1985 PEN-faulkner finalist
- 1984 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- 1984 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 28.34
Richard and Sara Everton mortgage, sell and borrow, leave friends and country to settle in the Mexican village of Ibarra. They intend to spend the rest of their lives here, in a place neither of them has seen, to speak a language neither of them know. Their dream is to reopen Richard’s grandfather’s abandoned copper mine.
In a few short months work is advancing in the mine and their home is ready—then Richard learns he has six years to live.
Richard’s determination to make the mine and village prosper matches Sara’s effort to deny the diagnosis. While…
- 1985 Pulitzer–fiction winner
- 1984 NBA–Fiction finalist
- 1984 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 22.35
Alison Lurie’s Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece is both a splendid comedy and poignant love story about two American academics in London. Virginia Miner, an unmarried tenured professor, is an Anglophile on leave to research a book. Fred Turner, a teacher at the same university, is recently separated, flat broke and miserable in this city where the rain never seems to end. The separate paths of these two lonely and naive innocents abroad lead them to strikingly similar destinations of newfound passion…and unexpected love.
By turns hilarious and intensely…
Family Dancing: Stories
- 1985 PEN-faulkner finalist
- 1984 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 12.35
Tender, unsettling, and amusing, these stories present families all unhappy in their own different ways. A mother who presides over her local Parents of Lesbians and Gays chapter has trouble accepting her son’s lover. A recently separated couple’s compulsion to maintain a twenty-six-year tradition seems to magnify futility. The New York Times called this collection “astonishing—funny, eloquent, and wise.”
- 1984 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.34
Death, birth, coming-of-age, marriage, and partings are spun into a wondrous reminiscence of the fateful, bittersweet passage of everyday lives in extraordinary times.
