Annal:1995 Whitbread Book Award for First Novel
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Whitbread Book Award in the year 1995. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
Behind the Scenes at the Museum
- 1995 Whitbread-1st Novel winner
- Score: 10.45
In her profoundly moving, uniquely comic debut, Kate Atkinson introduces readers to the mind and world of Ruby Lennox, born above a pet shop in York at the halfway point of the twentieth century, and determined to understand both the family that precedes her and the life that awaits her. Taking her own conception as her starting point, the irrepressible Ruby narrates a story of four generations of women, from her great-grandmother’s affair with a French photographer, to her mother’s unfulfilled dreams of Hollywood glamour, to her young sister’s efforts to upstage…
- 1995 Whitbread-1st Novel shortlist
- Score: 6.45
It’s the middle of the 1960s, the river’s in flood and the weather’s stuck in mid-March. It’s also the era of the space race and young Leonard wants the Russians to win. Suffering from a rare and painless wasting disease, he puts his faith in Yuri Gagarin, heroic pioneer of a weight-free existence.
Morvern Callar: A Novel
- 1997 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- 1995 Whitbread-1st Novel shortlist
- Score: 12.47
Morvern Callar, a low-paid employee in the local supermarket in a desolate and beautiful port town in the west of Scotland, wakes one morning in late December to find her strange boyfriend has committed suicide and is dead on the kitchen floor. Morvern’s reaction is both intriguing and immoral. What she does next is even more appalling. Moving across a blurred European landscape—from rural poverty and drunken mayhem of the port to the Mediterranean rave scene—we experience everything from Morvern’s stark, unflinching perspective.
Morvern is utterly…
