Annal:1996 Whitbread Book Award for Novel
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Whitbread Book Award in the year 1996. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 1996 Whitbread-Novel winner
- 1996 Booker shortlist
- 1996 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- Score: 22.46
On Wednesday, April 10, 1912, the RMS Titanic left Southampton on her maiden voyage to New York. Four days later, half an hour before midnight, she struck an iceberg. By 2 a.m. the last lifeboat had rowed frantically away. Minutes later the great ship sank. Fifteen hundred people had lost their lives. Every Man for Himself recaptures those four crucial days at the end of the Belle Epoque.
J. Pierpont Morgan’s nephew, en route to New York, has booked passage on the world’s most luxurious ocean liner. His companions include a host of Guggenheims,…
- 1996 Whitbread-Novel shortlist
- Score: 6.46
In this novel, Mr Page takes the reader from the brittle glamour of the 20s to the violent repression of the 50s; from Mayfair dining rooms to the steam room of a Turkish bath; from the ordinary world of Mr Page to the strange and unsettling world of Mr Clive.
- 1996 Whitbread-Novel shortlist
- Score: 6.46
J. G. Ballard once again reveals his visionary mastery in this warped tale of the unexpected
The setting for Cocaine Nights is the Costa del Sol and the stylish resort of Estrella de Mar. Into the queasy beauty of this artificial environment steps Charles Prentice, a travel writer from London who has come to visit his brother Frank, manager of the resort’s Club Nautico.
Frank is in jail, having confessed to setting an explosive fire that has taken five lives. Certain that the confession was coerced, Charles launches his own investigation. As he…
- 1996 Whitbread-Novel shortlist
- Score: 6.46
From our most celebrated writer of the psychological thriller comes this nerve-wracking yet eerily beautiful work of erotic obsession and madness. In the summer of 1959 Stella Raphael joins her psychiatrist husband, Max, at his new posting—a maximum-security hospital for the criminally insane. Beautiful and headstrong, Stella soon falls under the spell of Edgar Stark, a brilliant and magnetic sculptor who has been confined to the hospital for murdering his wife in a psychotic rage. But Stella’s knowledge of Edgar’s crime is no hindrance to the volcanic attraction…
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 Whitbread-Novel shortlist
- Score: 6.46
Fay Weldon is an irresistible blend of compassionate wisdom and deliciously nasty wit, and her consummate twenty-first novel is a tour de force. From its hilarious opening (“I’ve never seen a dead body.…Can I come too?”) to its satisfying final conflagration, it is a taut, scathing revelation of the nature of marital intimacy. Released from the safety of the conjugal hearth into the howling gales of widowhood, it’s hard to tell if Alexandra is losing her sanity or just her friends.
When Alexandra returns from her stint on the London stage as Ibsen’s sweet and…
