Annal:1996 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
From AwardAnnals
Results of the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in the year 1996. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 1996 IMPAC Dublin winner
- 1994 LATimes–Fiction winner
- 1993 Booker shortlist
- Score: 26.46
In Remembering Babylon David Malouf gives us a rich and compelling novel, in language of astonishing poise and resonance, about the settling of the continent down under, Australia, and the vicissitudes of first contact with the unknown. In the mid-1840s a thirteen-year-old cabin boy, Gemmy Fairley, is cast ashore from a British shipwreck onto the Queensland coast, and is taken in by aborigines. Sixteen years later, three children from a white settlement come upon this apparition: “The stick-like legs, all knobbed at the joints, suggested a wounded…
- 1996 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- Score: 6.46
A group of strangers, passengers on a day-boat that runs aground, are washed up on an island. Shaken and sodden, they nonetheless make quick work of the situation at hand. But what is the situation? They’ve invaded the closely protected enclave of an eminent art historian, but their presence seems to rouse in the historian’s assistant a long-ripening hunger for company.
Certainly the grounding of the boat was an accident, but one of the passengers seems to know the professor and to have an air of purpose about him. Why as their day on the island progresses,…
A Way in the World: A Novel
- 1996 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- Score: 6.46
“Most of Us Know the parents or grandparents we come from. But we go back and back, forever: we go back all of us to the very beginning: in our blood and bone and brain we carry the memories of thousands of beings.”
So observes the opening narrator of A Way in the World, and it is this conundrum—that the bulk of our inheritance must remain beyond our grasp—which suffuses this extraordinary work of fiction, the first in seven years by one of the most acclaimed writers of our time. Returning to the autobiographical mode he so brilliantly explored in…
- 1996 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- Score: 6.46
In lyrical and precise prose braided with myth and symbol, one of Holland’s most popular authors tells the story of a funny-looking man who loved beauty; of a proud, spiritual soul who, all his life, was intrigued by transfiguration and who, despite himself, became a player in a drama of jealousy and revenge.
The Laws: A Novel
Connie Palmen, Richard Huijing
- 1996 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- Score: 6.46
Over a period of seven years, a young philosophy student, Marie Deniet, encounters seven men: an astrologer, an epileptic, a philosopher, a priest, a physicist, an artist, and a psychiatrist. In her attempt to comprehend the laws these enigmatic loves have chosen to live by, Deniet questions life, love, and the universe in a voyage of self-discovery that sometimes gives her hope, and sometimes leaves her feeling marooned. By electing to investigate a woman’s sense of self by means of almost exclusive references to men, Connie Palmen triumphantly traverses the…
The Gospel According to Jesus Christ: A Novel
José Saramago, Giovanni Pontiero
- 1996 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- Score: 6.46
For Jose Saramago, the life of Jesus Christ and the story of His Passion are things of this earth. A child crying, a gust of wind, the caress of a woman half-asleep, the bleat of a goat or the bark of a dog, a prayer uttered in the grayish morning light. The adolescent Jesus is very much an adolescent: questioning, uncompromising, troubled by the world and by his body. His mother, like any mother, is devoted, fearful, resentful. The Holy Family has the complex frictions of any family. Yet this is not simple, debunking realism, for Saramago also fills his pages…
Away: A Novel
- 1996 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- Score: 6.46
Esther O’Malley Robertson gazes out at Lake Ontario from her home for perhaps the last time. This house, highly charged with memories and history, is part of a landscape that is now being swallowed by industry. The story of her family’s past has its beginnings in the 1840s off the northern coast of Ireland, where a young woman embraced a semiconscious sailor who had washed in with the tide, and later, with her husband and young son, fled the famine for Canada.
Jane Urquhart imbues the past with a shimmering clarity as she takes us from the harsh Irish coast…
