Annal:1996 Orange Prize for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Orange Prize in the year 1996. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- –first–
- Orange Prize
- 1997–>
A Spell of Winter: A Novel
- 1996 Orange winner
- Score: 10.46
Bearing the distinctive lyrical beauty of her predecessors, A Spell of Winter asserts Dunmore’s claim to the territories staked out by some of the great nineteenth-century novelists. But with a strong, sensuous magic and a modern understanding of love that is all her own, Dunmore defies all the old formulas.
Catherine and her brother, Rob, do not know why they have been abandoned by their parents. In the house of their grandfather, “the man from nowhere,” they forge a passionate refuge for themselves against the terror of family secrets, and while the…
- 1996 Orange shortlist
- Score: 6.46
In the late 19th century, an English missionary arrives on a remote island in the Indian Ocean, intent on wiping our fornication among the natives. Instead he incurs a curse that strikes first his dark-skinned wife, then his son and grandson. But is the curse supernatural--or a white man's guilty fascination with an alien new world? "A hypnotic, cryptic, haunting exploration of the power of memory."--Boston Globe.
- 1996 Orange shortlist
- Score: 6.46
It’s 1968. Frannie and Doris, sisters and spinsters, have been taking care of their father for their entire adult lives. When he dies, they hit the road in their Plymouth Valiant to take a much needed vacation. Frannie, the novel’s narrator, longs to continue her reclusive life with her sister. But Doris, cut free of responsibility, wants to raise hell and get laid. Their journey through the changing landscape of America—civil rights marches, the deaths of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago—is an elegy to a lost time…
- 1996 Orange shortlist
- Score: 6.46
Set in San Francisco and in a remote village of southern China, this is a tale of American pragmatism shaken, and soothed, by Chinese ghosts. What proof of love do we seek between mother and daughter, among sisters, lovers, and friends? What are its boundaries and failings? Can love go beyond “Until death do us part?” And if so, which aspects haunt us like regretful ghosts?
In 1962, Olivia, nearly six years old, meets Kwan, her adult half sister from China, for the first time. Olivia’s neglectful mother, who in pursuing a new marriage can’t provide the…
Ladder of Years: A Novel
- 1996 Orange shortlist
- Score: 6.46
Anne Tyler tells the story of a 40-year-old woman, the mother of three almost-grown children, who on a sudden impulse walks away from her marriage, hitches a ride into the unknown, and settles in a strange new town to invent a new life.
What propels Delia Grinstead, the wife of a Baltimore physician, as she is spending another rainy vacation with husband, children, and assorted relatives? Is it old hurts and humiliations that surface this particular summer in the family-infested beach cottage? The feeling that she has become expendable? The memory, perhaps, of…
- 1996 Orange shortlist
- Score: 6.46
Eveless Eden tells the story of a passionate love affair between a foreign correspondent for an American newspaper and the tough, sexy, talented photographer he meets at the site of an ecological disaster in Africa.
Noah swings between disillusion and romanticism, cynicism and faith, despair and hope, as he and Lilith pursue their adventure in Paris, London, at the fall of the Berlin Wall, and through the scandal of AIDS tainted blood in the orphanages of Nicolai Ceausescu’s Romania. Lilith’s fateful attraction to danger makes her vulnerable to the…
- –first–
- Orange Prize
- 1997–>
