Annal:1997 Orange Prize for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Orange Prize in the year 1997. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 1997 Orange winner
- 1996 Giller Prize shortlist
- Score: 16.47
It is a story of World War II as remembered and imagined by one of its survivors: a poet named Jakob Beer, traumatically orphaned as a young child and smuggled out of Poland, first to a Greek island (where he will return as an adult), and later to Toronto. It is the story of how, over his lifetime, Jakob learns the power of language—to destroy, to omit, to obliterate, but also to restore and to conjure, witness and tell—as he comes to understand and experience what was lost to him and of what is possible for him to regain.
Profoundly moving, brilliantly…
Alias Grace: A Novel
- 1996 Giller Prize winner
- 1998 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- 1997 Orange shortlist
- 1996 Booker shortlist
- 1996 Governor General's finalists
- Score: 34.46
Margaret Atwood takes us back in time and into the life and mind of one of the most enigmatic and notorious women of the nineteenth century. Grace Marks has been convicted for her involvement in the vicious murders of her employer, the wealthy Thomas Kinnear, and of Nancy Montgomery, his housekeeper and mistress. Some believe Grace is innocent; others think her evil or insane. Now serving a life sentence after a stint in Toronto’s lunatic asylum, Grace herself claims to have no memory of the murders.
- 1997 Orange shortlist
- 1996 LATimes–1st Fiction finalist
- Score: 12.47
In this brilliantly imagined novel, Amelia Earhart tells us what happened after she and her navigator, Fred Noonan, disappeared off the coast of New Guinea one glorious, windy day in 1937. And she tells us about herself.
There is her love affair with flying (“The sky is flesh”)…
There are her memories of the past: her childhood desire to become a heroine (“Heroines did what they wanted”)…her marriage to G.P. Putnam, who promoted her to fame, but was willing to gamble her life so that the book she was writing about her round-the-world flight would sell out…
- 1997 Orange shortlist
- Score: 6.47
A story about three Northern Irish sisters. It has a double narrative, part of which describes their childhood and shows the impact of the political changes and the violence of the late-1960s upon the people of Ulster, as the wholeness and coherence of early childhood gradually break down.
Accordion Crimes: A Novel
- 1997 Orange shortlist
- Score: 6.47
Rarely has a literary novel so captured the hearts and minds of readers across America and the world as E. Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News, winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Now we have Proulx’s new novel, Accordion Crimes, a masterpiece of storytelling that spans a century and a continent.
Accordion Crimes opens in 1890 in Sicily as an accordion maker completes his finest instrument and dreams of owning a music store in America. He and his eleven-year-old son, carrying little more than the accordion, voyage to…
Hen's Teeth: A Kellen Stewart Crime Thriller
- 1997 Orange shortlist
- Score: 6.47
At midnight in Glasgow, Dr. Kellen Stewart learns that her ex-lover Bridget—who was only 41—died of cardiac arrest. With the help of her pathologist friend, Kellen follows the evidence to Bridget’s farm, where she encounters a strange menagerie of priceless hens, lethal eggs, vanishing corpses, and bio-medical marvels to die for.
