Annal:1992 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the year 1992. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 1992 LATimes–1st Fiction winner
- Score: 10.42
1959: A Novel
- 1992 LATimes–1st Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.42
Thulani Davis’s 1959 is a powerful, poignant coming-of-age novel that captures a dramatic moment in American history as clearly as a photograph. It’s the summer of 1959 and Willie Tarrant of Turner, Virginia, is twelve. Her father and other adults in the town are worried about integration—how it will affect their children’s safety and the quality of their education—but for Willie it’s just another problem she’s going to have to deal with, like her chores and beginning to go out with boys. Willie and her friends—kids from good families with good grades—are being groomed to be sent in the first wave. Before this can happen, though, eight black college students, wearing suits and fresh haircuts, go into the Woolworth’s lunch counter—changing everything.
In 1959 one of the most talented writers of her generation has written a book that will become a classic of civil rights literature.
- 1992 LATimes–1st Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.42
In this extraordinary coming-of-age odyssey, Wally Lamb invites us to hitch a wild ride on a journey of love, pain, and renewal with the most heartbreakingly comical heroine to come along in years.
Meet Dolores Price. She’s 13, wise-mouthed but wounded, having bid her childhood goodbye. Stranded in front of her bedroom TV, she spends the next few years nourishing herself with the Mallomars, potato chips, and Pepsi her anxious mother supplies. When she finally orbits into young womanhood at 257 pounds, Dolores is no stronger and life is no kinder. But this time she’s determined to rise to the occasion and give herself one more chance before she really goes under.
- 1992 LATimes–1st Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.42
