Annal:1992 National Book Award for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the National Book Award in the year 1992. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
All the Pretty Horses: Volume 1 of The Border Trilogy
- 1992 NBA–Fiction winner
- 1992 NBCC–Fiction winner
- Score: 20.42
The national bestseller and the first volume in Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy, All the Pretty Horses is the tale of John Grady Cole, who at sixteen finds himself at the end of a long line of Texas ranchers, cut off from the only life he has ever imagined for himself. With two companions, he sets off for Mexico on a sometimes idyllic, sometimes comic journey to a place where dreams are paid for in blood.
- 1992 NBA–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.42
Greenville County, South Carolina, a wild, lush place, is home to the Boatwright family—rough-hewn men who drink hard and shoot up each other’s trucks, and indomitable women who marry young and age all too quickly. At the heart of this astonishing novel is Ruth Anne Boatwright, known simply as “Bone,” a South Carolina bastard with an annotated birth certificate to tell the tale. Observing everything with the mercilessly keen eye of a child, Bone finds herself caught up in a family triangle that will test the loyalty of her mother, Anney. Her stepfather, Daddy…
- 1992 NBA–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.42
Here is the dreamy and bittersweet story of a family divided by politics and geography by the Cuban revolution. It is the family story of Celia del Pino, and her husband, daughter and grandchildren, from the mid-1930s to 1980. Celia’s story mirrors the magical realism of Cuba itself, a country of beauty and poverty, idealism and corruption. Dreaming in Cuban presents a unique vision and a haunting lamentation for a past that might have been.
- 1992 NBA–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.42
The nation’s capital that serves as the setting for the stories in Edward P. Jones’s prizewinning collection, Lost in the City, lies far from the city of historic monuments and national politicians. Jones takes the reader beyond that world into the lives of African American men and women who work against the constant threat of loss to maintain a sense of hope. From “The Girl Who Raised Pigeons” to the well-to-do career woman awakened in the night by a phone call that will take her on a journey back to the past, the characters in these stories forge bonds…
- 1992 NBA–Fiction finalist
- 1992 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 12.42
In this towering story about a man pitting himself against the sea, against society, and against himself, Robert Stone again demonstrates that he is “one of the most impressive novelists of his generation” (New York Review of Books). Inviting comparison with the great sea novels of Conrad, Melville, and Hemingway, Outerbridge Reach is also the portrait of two men and the powerful, unforgettable woman they both love - and for whom they are both ready, in their very different ways, to stake everything. As the San Francisco Chronicle said, “Robert…
