Annal:1999 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the year 1999. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
Freedom Song: Three Novels
- 1999 LATimes–Fiction winner
- Score: 10.49
What most immediately galvanizes the reader of Freedom Song is the elegance and idiosyncrasy of Amit Chaudhuri’s writing. In the words of Salman Rushdie: “[His] languorous, elliptical, beautiful prose is impressively impossible to place in any category at all.” And it is this quality of ineffability that gives Chaudhuri’s words the power they have to reveal—slowly, quietly, with a richness of sensual detail and subtle humor—the significance of the ordinary moments of life.
A boy spends a summer and a winter with his parents in a Bombay high-rise, and…
- 1999 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- 1999 NBA–Fiction finalist
- Score: 12.49
Tense with suspense from the first line, this is one of the great American realist novels. In this page-turning, breathtaking novel, the characters will walk off the page and into your life. And a small house will seem like the most important piece of territory in the world. On a road crew in California, a former colonel in the Iranian Air Force under the Shah yearns to restore his family’s dignity. When an attractive bungalow comes available on county auction for a fraction of its value, he sees a great opportunity for himself, his wife, and his children. But…
- 1999 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- 1999 NBA–Fiction finalist
- Score: 12.49
A heartstrong story of family and romance, tribulation and tenacity, set on the High Plains east of Denver.
In the small town of Holt, Colorado, a high school teacher is confronted with raising his two boys alone after their mother retreats first to the bedroom, then altogether. A teenage girl—her father long since disappeared, her mother unwilling to have her in the house—is pregnant, alone herself, with nowhere to go. And out in the country, two brothers, elderly bachelors, work the family homestead, the only world they’ve ever known.
From these unsettled…
- 2000 PEN-faulkner winner
- 1999 NBA–Fiction winner
- 2000 Pulitzer–fiction finalist
- 1999 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- Score: 32.5
This is the story of Lin Kong, a man living in two worlds, struggling with the conflicting claims of two utterly different women as he moves through the political minefields of a society designed to regulate his every move and stifle the promptings of his innermost heart.
For more than seventeen years, this devoted and ambitious doctor has been in love with an educated, clever, modern woman, Manna Wu. But back in the traditional world of his home village lives the wife his family chose for him when he was young—a humble and touchingly loyal woman, whom he…
- 2000 Pulitzer–fiction finalist
- 1999 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- Score: 12.5
Annie Proulx’s masterful language and fierce love of Wyoming are evident in this collection of stories about loneliness, quick violence, and wrong kinds of love. In “The Mud Below,” a rodeo rider’s obsession marks the deepening fissures between his family life and self-imposed isolation. In “The Half-Skinned Steer,” an elderly fool drives west to the ranch he grew up on for his brother’s funeral, and dies a mile from home. In “Brokeback Mountain,” the difficult affair between two cowboys survives everything but the world’s violent intolerance.
These are…
