Annal:1997 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
From AwardAnnals
Results of the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in the year 1997. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
Javier Marías, Margaret Jull Costa
- 1997 IMPAC Dublin winner
- Score: 10.47
Juan knows little about his widowed father Ranz, a man with a troubled past; if he has been told no lies, that is because he has asked no questions. All he does know is that before marrying Juan’s mother Ranz was married to her elder sister and she had committed suicide. The unspoken dialogue between father and son, however, is to become a spelling out of the horrifying truth once Juan has been married for a year to Luisa, and the bride turns discreet confessor to the burdened old man. What gradually emerges into the cold light of day is a repetition of scenes…
- 1996 LATimes–Fiction winner
- 1995 Giller Prize winner
- 1997 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- 1996 Booker shortlist
- Score: 32.46
With a compassionate realism and narrative sweep that recall the work of Charles Dickens, this magnificent novel captures all the cruelty and corruption, dignity and heroism, of India. The time is 1975. The place is an unnamed city by the sea. The government has just declared a State of Emergency, in whose upheavals four strangers—a spirited widow, a young student uprooted from his idyllic hill station, and two tailors who have fled the caste violence of their native village—will be thrust together, forced to share one cramped apartment and an uncertain…
- 1997 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- Score: 6.47
In 1931, Robert Johnson allegedly sold his soul to the devil, receiving legendary blues skills in return. He went on to record only twenty-nine songs before being murdered on August 16, 1938. In 1992, however, Johnson suddenly reappears on the Spokane Indian Reservation and meets Thomas Builds-the-Fire, the misfit storyteller of the Spokane Tribe. When Johnson passes his enchanted instrument to Thomas—lead singer of the rock-and-roll band Coyote Springs—a magical odyssey begins that will take the band from reservation bars to small-town taverns, from the cement…
- 1997 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- Score: 6.47
A piercing, unforgettable tale of the horror and spiritual weariness of war, Novel Without a Name will shatter every preconception Americans have about what happened in the jungles of Vietnam. With Duong Thu Huong, whose Paradise of the Blind was published to high critical acclaim in 1993, Vietnam has found a voice both lyrical and stark, powerful enough to capture the conflict that left millions dead and spiritually destroyed her generation. Banned in the author’s native country for its scathing dissection of the day-to-day realities of life for…
Pereira Declares: A Testimony
Antonio Tabucchi, Patrick Creagh
- 1997 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- Score: 6.47
Salazar’s fascist Portugal in 1938 is part of the menacing cloud that hangs over Europe, and Dr. Pereira is an aging, overweight, lonely, mostly retired journalist who doesn’t want to think about it. He escapes facing the ominous times by translating nineteenth-century French stories for the weekly Culture Page he edits for a Lisbon newspaper. He dwells on the past and over-indulges in heavily-sugared glasses of lemonade and omelettes aux fines berbes.
“Are you living in another world, and you working for a newspaper?” his exasperated friend Father Antonio…
- 1997 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- Score: 6.47
In his newest novel, A Tiler’s Afternoon, Lars Gustafsson invites us to share a day’s work with Torsten Bergman, an aging, semi-retired tile-layer.
On this particular day, Torsten arrives at an empty suburban villa, partially renovated and left unfinished. A master craftsman, he knows what to do and goes about his business, all the while reminiscing over his past, considering what may be left of his future, daydreaming about the mysterious Sophie K., the absent occupant of the villa’s upstairs flat. No one checks on the work. With the close of the day…
- 1997 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- 1996 PEN-faulkner finalist
- 1995 LATimes–1st Fiction finalist
- Score: 18.47
It is 1963, and young Denise Palms, reared in rural Virginia by her grandmother, has just rejoined her mother, new stepfather, and two older brothers in Detroit. Denise is an ordinary, intelligent negro girl in a not unusual negro family, which means that she is expected to cook and clean house, go to school, and take care of her mother’s baby when it comes. In this groundbreaking debut, A. J. Verdelle tells the story of Denise’s family—a story filtered through the perspective of Denise’s vibrant, maturing intelligence. Studies with an uncompromising new teacher,…
Morvern Callar: A Novel
- 1997 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- 1995 Whitbread-1st Novel shortlist
- Score: 12.47
Morvern Callar, a low-paid employee in the local supermarket in a desolate and beautiful port town in the west of Scotland, wakes one morning in late December to find her strange boyfriend has committed suicide and is dead on the kitchen floor. Morvern’s reaction is both intriguing and immoral. What she does next is even more appalling. Moving across a blurred European landscape—from rural poverty and drunken mayhem of the port to the Mediterranean rave scene—we experience everything from Morvern’s stark, unflinching perspective.
Morvern is utterly…
