Annal:1994 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the year 1994. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
The Year of the Frog: A Novel
Martin M. Simecka, Peter Petro
- 1994 LATimes–1st Fiction winner
- Score: 10.44
Set in Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, in the 1980s, Martin Simecka’s stunning first novel, The Year of the Frog, portrays a young man struggling to come to terms with his circumstances in the last days of communist dictatorship. Milan, the son of a former party official now imprisoned for dissident activities, is barred from the university despite the fact that he is a brilliant student and an extraordinary runner. Forced to work, Milan takes a series of menial jobs—first as a surgical orderly in a hospital, next as a clerk in an under-stocked hardware store, lastly as an assistant in a maternity hospital for both births and abortions—all of which serve to break open his life.
Two great passions save him from the bleakness of his everyday existence: long-distance running, and his love for Tania, a beautiful university student from whom he seeks salvation and ultimately marries. The Year of the Frog is a coming-of-age story, a romance, and a novel which poses important questions about life and death, about love and freedom, faithfulness and infidelity.
- 1994 LATimes–1st Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.44
Jose Barreiro’s masterfully written historical novel recounts the Indians’ discovery of the ways of the Europeans, as seen by Christopher Columbus’ young adopted Indian son both during their first encounters as well as in Spain. While vividly recreating the often violent clashes of cultures and expectations that eventually disaffected and decimated the indigenous populations, Barreiro has maintained total accuracy in his exploration of the Taino cultures. This forgotten chapter of history makes for fascinating reading by providing an alternative view of the so frequently mythologized encounter and the men who brought it about.
A Place Where the Sea Remembers
- 1994 LATimes–1st Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.44
A Place Where the Sea Remembers is a mesmerizing tale of love and anger, hope and tragedy. At the heart of this rich and bewitching story is Chayo, the flower-seller, and her husband Candelario, the salad-maker, who finally may be blessed with the child they thought they would never have. Their cause for happiness, however, triggers a series of events that marks the lives of everyone in the small village of Santiago, Mexico.
Woven into Chayo’s and Candelario’s story are an unforgettable array of characters: Marta, the hotel maid who reads cast-off American magazines and dreams of El Paso; don Justo, the heartbroken fortune-teller; Esperanza, the midwife who finds new love with Rafael, the shy schoolteacher. Their secret dreams and desires are known only to the omniscient sea and to the curandera Remedios, a healer who hears them all.
The hopes, triumphs, failures, and shortcomings of this captivating array of individuals create a picture of life that is both a universal portrait and an insider’s look at life in Latin America.
- 1994 LATimes–1st Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.44
“The longing for a destiny is nowhere stronger than in our romantic life” we are told at the outset of Alain de Botton’s On Love, a hip, charming, and devastatingly witty rumination on the thrills and pitfalls of romantic love.
The narrator is smitten by Chloe on a Paris-London flight, and by the time they’ve reached the luggage carousel, he knows he is in love. He loves her chestnut hair and pale nape and watery green eyes, the way she drives a car and eats Chinese food, the gap that makes her teeth Kantian and not Platonic, her views on Heidegger’s Being and Time—although he hates her taste in shoes. On Love plots the course of their affair from the initial delirium of infatuation to the depths of suicidal despair, through the (Groucho) “Marxist” stage of coming to terms with being loved by the unattainable beloved, through a fit of anhedonia, defined in medical texts as a disease resulting from the terror brought on by the threat of utter happiness, and finally through the nausea induced and terrorist tactics employed when the beloved begins, inexplicably,…
- 1994 LATimes–1st Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.44
Against incredible odds, Luz Delcano is determined to find her son Bernabe from whom she was separated in the chaos that followed the assassination of Archbishop Romero. Her odyssey takes her through Mexico and into Southern California, then back again to El Salvador for the breath-taking final scenes which pit together brother against brother.
In Search of Bernabe is a family saga that has repercussions of biblical dimension and resonates with international intrigue. Limon has created memorable characters: Luz Delcano, a survivor of political purges; Lucio Delcano, Luz’s son, who is the head of the death squads; Father Hugh and his friend Augie, involved in the traffic of arms; Bernabe, whose destiny was to become a priest but instead winds up as a guerrilla fighter.
