Annal:1997 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the National Book Critics Circle Award in the year 1997. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 1997 NBCC–Fiction winner
- Score: 10.47
Set in the age of Goethe, in the small towns and great universities of late-eighteenth-century Germany, The Blue Flower tells the true story of a passionate, impetuous student of philosophy who will later gain fame as the Romantic poet Novalis, and of his curious obsession for his one “true philosophy”—the plain and simple twelve-year-old Sophie. The irrationality of love and the clarity of purpose that come with knowing one’s own fate—these are the themes that Penelope Fitzgerald explores here with her trademark mix of wit, grace, and mischievous humor.
Cold Mountain: A Novel
- 1997 NBA–Fiction winner
- 1997 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 16.47
One of the most acclaimed novels in recent memory, Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain is a masterpiece that is at once an enthralling adventure, a stirring love story, and a luminous evocation of a vanished American in all its savagery, solitude, and splendor.
Sorely wounded and fatally disillusioned in the fighting at Petersburg, Inman, a Confederate soldier, decides to walk back to his home in the Blue Ridge Mountains and to Ada, the woman he loved there years before. His trek across the disintegrating South brings him into intimate and sometimes lethal…
Underworld: A Novel
- 1999 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- 1998 Pulitzer–fiction finalist
- 1997 NBA–Fiction finalist
- 1997 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 24.49
Our lives, our half century.
Nick Shay and Klara Sax knew each other once, intimately, and they meet again in the American desert. He is trying to outdistance the crucial events of his early life, haunted by the hard logic of loss and by the echo of a gunshot in a basement room. She is an artist who has made a blood struggle for independence.
Don DeLillo’s mesmerizing novel opens with a legendary baseball game played in New York in 1951. The glorious outcome—the home run that wins the game is called the Shot Heard Round the World—shades into the grim news…
- 1998 Pulitzer–fiction winner
- 1997 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 16.48
As the American century draws to an uneasy close, Philip Roth gives us a novel of unqualified greatness that is an elegy for all our century’s promises of prosperity, civic order, and domestic bliss. Roth’s protagonist is Swede Levov, a legendary athlete at his Newark high school, who grows up in the booming postwar years to marry a former Miss New Jersey, inherit his father’s glove factory, and move into a stone house in the idyllic hamlet of Old Rimrock. And then one day in 1968, Swede’s beautiful American luck deserts him.
For Swede’s adored daughter,…
- 1997 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.47
Dreams of My Russian Summers tells the poignant story of a boy growing up amid the harsh realities of Soviet life in the 1960s and ‘70s, and of his extraordinary love for an elegant Frenchwoman, Charlotte Lemonnier, who is his grandmother. Every summer he visits his grandmother in a dusty village overlooking the vast steppes. Here, during the warm evenings, they sit on Charlotte’s narrow, flower-covered bacony and listen to tales from another time, another place: Paris at the turn of the century. She who used to see Proust playing tennis in Neuilly…
