Annal:1996 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in the year 1996. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
Last Orders: A Novel
- 1996 Booker winner
- 1996 JT Black-Fiction winner
- 1998 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- 1996 Whitbread-Novel shortlist
- Score: 32.46
Graham Swift’s first novel since the highly acclaimed Ever After is a subtle yet deeply felt exploration of the ways in which friendship and love are shaped by the past and by fate. At its center is a group of men, friends since the Second World War, whose lives revolve around work, family, the racetrack, and their favorite pub. Now, the death of one of them, and the survivors’ task of driving their friend’s ashes from London to the seaside town where they’ll be scattered, compels them to take stock.
Through conversation and memory they trace the paths…
- 1996 JT Black-Fiction winner
- Score: 10.46
A challenging, chilling postmodern novel that explores the ill-defined margins between imagination and reality, sanity and madness.
This story of seductive decadence plays on the Marquis de Sade’s work of the same name. It chronicles one man’s obsession with beauty and his journey, through the darkest recesses of the mind, in its pursuit. An unnamed compulsive art collector becomes fascinated by a woman’s portrait, one marked with a simple plaque that reads “Justine.” Searching London for the object of his desire, he finds two women: Justine, a chiseled…
