Annal:1996 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the year 1996. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
The Smell of Apples: A Novel
- 1996 LATimes–1st Fiction winner
- Score: 10.46
The Smell of Apples is a time bomb of a novel. Set in the bitter twilight of apartheid in South Africa in the 1970s, it is a haunting story narrated by an eleven-year-old child, Marnus Erasmus, who simply and devastatingly records the social turmoil and racial oppression that are destroying his own land. Using his family as a microcosm of the corroding society at large, Marnus tells a troubling tale—of a childhood corrupted, of unexpected sexual defilements, and of an innocence gone astray.
- 1997 PEN-faulkner finalist
- 1996 LATimes–1st Fiction finalist
- Score: 12.47
These killings were neat and professional, and Burl had to acknowledge that his appetite was largely unaffected. He ran through the local possibilities in his mind: the kitchen at Terrell’s would be closed by now, Ho Sai Gai was closed for sure, he was never really welcome at the Chateau, and fast food was hateful to him, if for no other reason than the uniformity and skimpiness of the seating, which seemed such an apt metaphor for the whole experience. He’d been stuck once in one of those neocolonial swivel chairs that are attached to the plastic tables at…
- 1996 LATimes–1st Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.46
The Secret of the Bulls is a thoroughly enchanting and lush romantic novel, a passionate family saga that brings to life the brilliantly-colored world of prerevolutionary Cuba. It is a love story, the story of Maximiliano and Dolores’s lifelong passionate love for one another, anchored firmly in a world where love stories are larger than life, where desires are shamelessly hot, where male pride is fierce, and family loyalty sacred.
Bernardo’s original and spellbinding novel explores three generations of love and passion, forbidden kisses, and enduring…
- 1996 LATimes–1st Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.46
This lovely fiction, by one poet about another, is cast in the form of letters that Emily Dickinson might well have written in 1847 as a seventeen-year-old student at Miss Lyon’s Academy, where her teachers and fellow students found her original, witty, lovable ways beyond them. She struck them as little short of blasphemous in her expressed passion for the works of Shakespeare and for referring to the Bible as “literature.” Other versions of Emily are revealed in letters exchanged between her first editor, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and a Miss Mann, who as a…
The Debt to Pleasure: A Novel
- 1996 Whitbread-1st Novel winner
- 1996 LATimes–1st Fiction finalist
- Score: 16.46
The Debt to Pleasure is a wickedly funny ode to food. Traveling from Portsmouth to the south of France, Tarquin Winot, the book’s snobbish narrator, instructs us in his philosophy on everything from the erotics of dislike to the psychology of the menu. Under the guise of completing a cookbook, Winot is in fact on a much more sinister mission that only gradually comes to light.
- 1996 LATimes–1st Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.46
Victor Kelly is the resurrection man, a violent and ruthless Protestant killer roaming the streets of Belfast in the 1970s. In this, his brilliant and shocking debut novel, Eoin McNamee announced his arrival as one of the leading chroniclers of Ireland’s fractured past.
- 1997 Orange shortlist
- 1996 LATimes–1st Fiction finalist
- Score: 12.47
In this brilliantly imagined novel, Amelia Earhart tells us what happened after she and her navigator, Fred Noonan, disappeared off the coast of New Guinea one glorious, windy day in 1937. And she tells us about herself.
There is her love affair with flying (“The sky is flesh”)…
There are her memories of the past: her childhood desire to become a heroine (“Heroines did what they wanted”)…her marriage to G.P. Putnam, who promoted her to fame, but was willing to gamble her life so that the book she was writing about her round-the-world flight would sell out…
- 1996 LATimes–1st Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.46
When big-league ballplayers return from the war, unhappy with the contracts the club owners offer them, the wealthy Pasquel brothers pay unheard-of salaries to lure disaffected players—Sal Maglie, Vern Stephens, Danny Gardella, Max Lanier among them—to Mexico. When they get there, they see that the league already has major-league-caliber players—Negro Leaguers and Latinos—banned from the majors by the color line or shunned by subtler forms of racism. What follows is the first fully integrated season in the history of baseball.
In a cast that includes Ernest…
