Annal:1995 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the year 1995. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 1995 LATimes–Fiction winner
- Score: 10.45
Sprawling between three continents and two historical eras, William Boyd’s lushly atmospheric novel cements his reputation as the heir to the grand narrative traditions of Joseph Conrad and W. Somerset Maugham. The novel opens in Los Angeles in 1936, when architect kay Fischer is approached by an elderly man named Salvador Carriscant, who claims to be her father—and who insists that she accompany him to Lisbon in a search for the great lost love of his life.
En route to Portugal, Carriscant, a former surgeon in the war-torn Philippines, tells Kay the story…
- 1994 Whitbread-Novel winner
- 1995 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- Score: 16.44
Felicia is unmarried, pregnant, and penniless. She steals away from a small Irish town and drifts through the industrial English Midlands, searching for the boyfriend who left her. Instead she meets up with Mr. Hilditch, who is looking for a new friend to join the five other girls in his Memory Lane. But strange, sad, terrifying tricks of chance unravel both his and Felicia’s delusions in a story that will magnetize fans of Alfred Hitchcock and Ruth Rendell, even as it resonates with William Trevor’s own “impeccable strength and piercing profundity” (The Washington Post Book World).
Open Secrets: Stories
- 1995 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- 1994 Governor General's finalists
- Score: 12.45
In these eight tales, Munro evokes the devastating power of old love suddenly recollected. She tells of vanished schoolgirls and indentured frontier brides and an eccentric recluse who, in the course of one surpassingly odd dinner party, inadvertently lands herself a wealthy suitor from exotic Australia. And Munro shows us how one woman’s romantic tale of capture and escape in the high Balkans may end up inspiring another woman who is fleeing a husband and lover in present-day Canada.
“Open Secrets is a book that dazzles with its faith in language and…
- 1995 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.45
A powerful novel about innocence and guilt, atonement and healing, friendship and betrayal, Trinity Fields maps the landscape of the American soul.
Kip and Brice were best friends, born on the same day in 1944 in Los Alamos, New Mexico, the most secret place on earth. Sons of men who engineered the atom bomb, they play macabre games as children, tempting the fate that looms over their closed community. As they come of age in the mid-60s, Brice is drawn into antiwar activism, while Kip disappears into Vietnam and ultimately into the secret war in…
- 1995 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.45
In this “startling, fasciniating, disturbing” (Library Journal) companion to Lilian’s Story, Kate Grenville takes on a daunting challenge: to imagine, from the inside out, how an apparently respectable Victorian gentleman can persuade himself that he has a right, perhaps even a “manly” duty to rape any woman under his control: his shopgirls, his servants, his wife, even his daughter.
