Annal:1998 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the year 1998. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 1998 LATimes–1st Fiction winner
- Score: 10.48
One hundred and sixty years ago a young Englishman founded a private raj on the coast of Borneo. The world he created eventually took in a territory the size of England, its expansion campaigns paid for in human heads. Here, polite Victorian conventions coexisted tenuously with one of the most violent cultures on earth, often with startling results: pockets of tenderness and extreme brutality appearing where least expected.
Into this world flowed a small tribe of adventurers, fugitives, criminals, and saints— the madly talented and simply mad. And the women followed: wives and would-be wives, spinster nursemaids and heartless schemers, the rigidly virtuous and the virtually desperate. And always, the children, innocents too often the victims of an elemental nature both lush and deadly.
Kalimantaan is the story of this world, these people. But the deeper story resides in the realm of the heart. It is about love in absurd conditions, the tenacity of it as well as our ability to miss it repeatedly and with perverse genius.
Hunger: A Novella and Stories
- 1998 LATimes–1st Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.48
Not since Maxine Hong Kingston and Amy Tan has a fiction writer explored with such powerful intensity the experience of being Asian American. The characters who inhabit this extraordinary fictional debut are caught between the burden of their past history and the fragility of their unchartered future. Hunger illuminates how first-generation immigrants from China, culturally and emotionally uprooted from their homeland, mistrust connection even as they hunger for attachment—and how the past affects and shapes their children.
In luminous prose, these moving stories of love and loss explore the profound and painful ties between husband and wife, parent and child, sister and sister. The stunning title novella is told by a woman whose love for an exiled musician compels her into a tragic marriage in which her husband’s unfulfilled desires nearly destroy their children. In other stories, a ghost seduces a young girl into a flooded river; a mother commands a daughter to avenge her father’s death.
Lan Samantha Chang weaves the forces of war and magic, food and desire, ghosts and family,…
- 1998 LATimes–1st Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.48
Despite misgivings about moving to such a remote and primitive place (and bringing their young daughter with them), Peter and June Campbell leave Massachusetts for the lush rain forest of Papua New Guinea where Peter will conduct a year of medical research for his doctoral thesis. Dark undercurrents of their feelings for one another rise inexorably to the surface. And, as the ties that bind the Campbells slowly unravel, they begin to explore the undiscovered in themselves.
Spare and evocative, The Undiscovered Country offers an uncompromising vision of the fragility of the family and of the resiliency of the human spirit.
- 1998 LATimes–1st Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.48
Through the unwavering gaze of a young boy, Nicholas Papandreou narrates the story of a family uprooted from their home in the United States to live in Greece in pursuit of a father’s political ambitions.
In a delicately crafted series of vignettes that together create the portrait of an unforgettable family, A Crowded Heart follows young Alex as he grows under the shadow of his father, the future Prime Minister. This breathtaking first novel is set against a lusciously wrought Greek landscape, as Alex and his family move through the dangerous world of Byzantine politics and are swept up in the avalanche of revolution, military dictatorship, and ultimately, exile.
With the creativity and perspicacity of a novelist, and the deep insight of personal experience, Nicholas Papandreou has written a sensuous and intimately conveyed novel of the highest order.
- 1998 LATimes–1st Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.48
As this evocative novel opens, former jazz trumpet star Ronnie Reboulet hasn’t picked up his horn in more than five years. Against the shadow of Patty Hearst’s kidnapping in 1970s San Francisco, Ronnie, a charming but emotionally distant man, struggles to make a life free of drugs and outside of the music business. With the support of his soulful companion, Betty, and his daughter, Rae, an aspiring singer, Ronnie attempts a comeback that will have readers rooting for him every step of the way.
Composed in short scenes that segue into one another like a songwriter’s medley, Bart Schneider’s Blue Bossa echoes the Buddy Bolden legend in Michael Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter. Readers will relish the cross-rhythms of a jazz novel alive with intimate music and a family novel filled with affections withheld and restored.
