Annal:1990 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in the year 1990. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
Brazzaville Beach: A Novel
- 1990 JT Black-Fiction winner
- Score: 10.4
In the heart of a civil war-torn African nation, primate researcher Hope Clearwater made a shocking discovery about apes and man…
Young, alone, and far from her family in Britain, Hope Clearwater contemplates the extraordinary events that left her washed up like driftwood on Brazzaville Beach. It is here, on the distant, lonely outskirts of Africa, where she must come to terms with the perplexing and troubling circumstances of her recent past. For Hope is a survivor of the devastating cruelities of apes and humans alike. And to move forward, she must first grasp some hard and elusive truths: about marriage and madness, about the greed and savagery of charlatan science…and about what compels seemingly benign creatures to kill for pleasure alone.
