Annal:1999 Whitbread Book Award for First Novel
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Whitbread Book Award in the year 1999. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 1999 Whitbread-1st Novel winner
- Score: 10.49
Frankie Blue has an overwhelming desire to fit in somewhere. Up until now, his friends have kept him grounded, but, with his wedding day fast approaching, Frankie starts to question his relationship with the lads as well as his relationship with Vronky, his glamourous, sexy but suddenly nagging fiancee.
White City Blue could so easily have fallen into the makeshift-Nick Hornby-throwback trap, but is saved by the fact that it is actually quite an articulate study of a man made of little more than the suit he wears and the car he drives.
Frankie is as…
- 1999 Whitbread-1st Novel shortlist
- Score: 6.49
First novels about childhood don’t come more erudite or thrilling than this. Haddie Ashton, aged 13, is embroiled in a summer holiday full of mystery, tragedy and learning the “A” section of the encyclopaedia (thus we get potted discourses on Agorazonta, Alcibiades and Animism delivered in a refreshingly wondering, childlike tone). But, together with her wilfully eccentric best friend, Louis Lewis, she gets up to more nefarious deeds—cat-burgling, for instance, and exploring an empty, neighbouring house. Thirteen years ago, from the top storey of this sinister…
- 2001 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- 1999 Booker shortlist
- 1999 Whitbread-1st Novel shortlist
- Score: 18.51
Hugh Bawn was a modern hero, a dreamer, a Socialist, a man of the people who revolutionized Scotland’s residential development after World War II. Now he lies dying on the eighteenth floor of one of the flats he built, flats that are being demolished along with the idealism he inherited from his mother. Hugh’s final months are plagued by memory and loss, by bitter feelings about his family and the country that could not live up to the housing constructed for it. His grandson, Jamie, comes home to watch over his dying mentor and sees in the man and in the land…
- 1999 Whitbread-1st Novel shortlist
- Score: 6.49
Daphne is the sort of woman who lives alone because she can “no longer bear conversations”. She has an orderly mind and she’s proud of it. At 74 her faculties remain as sharp as they were 50 years ago when she worked in the War Office, interviewing suspected Fifth Columnists. By 1940s standards her work there was dutiful beyond reproach, but civil rights standards have moved on since then. When Rachel, her favourite son Oliver’s girlfriend, suggests she take part in a programme about internment and deportations during the war, Daphne clams up. She knows better…
