Annal:1996 Whitbread Book Award for First Novel
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Whitbread Book Award in the year 1996. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
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.
Reading in the Dark: A Novel
- 1997 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- 1996 Booker shortlist
- 1996 Whitbread-1st Novel shortlist
- Score: 18.47
Seamus Deane’s first novel is a mesmerizing story of childhood set against the violence of Northern Ireland in the 1940s and 1950s.
The boy narrator grows up haunted by a truth he both wants and does not want to discover. The matter: a deadly betrayal, unspoken and unspeakable, born of political enmity. As the boy listens through the silence that surrounds him, the truth spreads like a stain until it engulfs him and his family. And as he listens, and watches, the world of legend—the stone fort of Grianan, home of the warrior Fianna; the Field of the…
- 1996 Whitbread-1st Novel shortlist
- Score: 6.46
Hannah comes from a family beset by madness and sadness. Surrounded by the clever and the eccentric and the gloomy, can she unravel the mysterious past and escape her legacy? And will she ever get to Arizona?
- 1996 Whitbread-1st Novel shortlist
- Score: 6.46
A tubercular child, Irene is banished to a sanitorium where, long after she is cured, she remains as a ministering angel to the lonely and the sickly—especially the men, whose furtive groping in the dark still leaves her virginal in body and in soul. But when one patient misconstrues her mission, Irene seeks an escape—and a marriage proposal from Stanley Godwin provides it.
From this provocative beginning Mary Morrissy spins her haunting story of one woman’s search for home and family, and for a sense of belonging that has long been denied her. Although…
