Annal:1997 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the year 1997. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
Don't Erase Me: Stories
- 1997 LATimes–1st Fiction winner
- Score: 10.47
Here are voices unlike any you have heard before. Carolyn Ferrell’s debut collection of stories features young people, mostly girls, on the verge of being erased from society but determined to endure. They are black or biracial, poor or from broken families, almost-adults navigating a treacherous world. Yet their voices—incandescently street-smart—speak of passion, of connection, of hope wherever they can find it.
Ferrell validates these characters’ lives with penetrating sympathy and spirit. Her stories uncover the particular heartache of the young that…
- 1997 Booker winner
- 1997 LATimes–1st Fiction finalist
- Score: 16.47
The year is 1969. In the state of Kerala, on the southernmost tip of India, a skyblue Plymouth with chrome tailfins is stranded on the highway amid a Marxist workers’ demonstration. Inside the car sit two-egg twins Rahel and Esthappen, and so begins their tale… Armed only with the invincible innocence of children, they fashion a childhood for themselves in the shade of the wreck that is their family—their lonely, lovely mother, Ammu (who loves by night the man her children love by day), their blind grandmother, Mammachi (who plays Handel on her violin), their…
- 1999 Orange winner
- 1998 Edgar-1st Novel nominee
- 1997 LATimes–1st Fiction finalist
- Score: 22.49
An auspicious debut novel by a young writer who will remind readers of Anne Lamott and Anne Tyler
Crime in the Neighborhood centers on a headline event— the molestation and murder of a twelve-year-old boy in a Washington, D.C., suburb. At the time of the murder, 1973, Marsha was nine years old and as an adult she still remembers that summer as a time when murder and her own family’s upheaval were intertwined. Everyone, it seemed to Marsha at the time, was committing crimes. Her father deserted his family to take up with her mother’s younger sister. Her…
- 1997 LATimes–1st Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.47
In a small town among the citrus groves in the Santa Bernita Valley, so the locals claim, nothing ever goes according to plan. “It’s a great place to live, they say, if you like surprises: it’s just like life, only different.”
Certainly a number of Rito’s inhabitants—fewer than a hundred in all—are surprised to be living here. Red Ray, for instance, a wildly alcoholic lawyer who bought a dilapidated Victorian mansion in an attempt to rehabilitate his marriage and regain the affections of his wife and young son. After destroying those hopes with a spectacular…
- 1997 LATimes–1st Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.47
A little girl lives with her family in a picturesque seaside community near San Francisco. An American neighborhood like any other, sheltered in the seeming tranquillity of the 1950s. Except it exists on the island of Alcatraz, the Rock, where a looming cellhouse imprisons the most vicious and irredeemable of America’s criminals. Olivia grows up here and watches as her family slowly falls apart, trapped in its own prison rules and silences. She watches the disintegration of her mother, a brilliant woman isolated in a role that closes in on her as inexorably as…
