Annal:2000 National Book Award for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the National Book Award in the year 2000. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
In America: A Novel
- 2000 NBA–Fiction winner
- Score: 10.5
In America is a kaleidoscopic portrait of America on the cusp of modernity. As she did in her enormously popular novel The Volcano Lover, Susan Sontag casts a story located in the past in a fresh, provocative light to create a fictional world full of contemporary resonance.
In 1876 a group of Poles led by Maryna Zalezowska, Poland’s greatest actress, emigrate to the United States and travel to California to found a “utopian commune.” When the commune fails, Maryna stays, learns English, and—as Marina Zalenska—forges a new, even more triumphant…
- 2000 NBA–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.5
From “one of our most gifted writers” (Chicago Tribune), here is a superb new novel that delicately unearths the myriad manifestations of extraordinary love between ordinary people.
The Feast of Love is just that—a sumptuous work of fiction about the thing that most distracts and delights us. In a re-imagined Midsummer Night’s Dream, men and women speak of and desire their ideal mates; parents seek out their lost children; adult children try to come to terms with their own parents and, in some cases, find new ones.
In vignettes both…
- 2000 NBA–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.5
Alan Lightman’s first novel, Einstein’s Dreams, was greeted with international praise. Salman Rushdie called it “at once intellectually provocative and touching and comic and so very beautifully written.” Michiko Kakutani wrote in The New York Times that the novel creates “a magical, metaphysical realm . . . as in Calvino’s work, the fantastical elements of the stories are grounded in precise, crystalline prose.” With The Diagnosis, Lightman gives us his most ambitious and penetrating novel yet.
While rushing to his office one warm summer…
- 2001 Pulitzer–fiction finalist
- 2000 NBA–Fiction finalist
- Score: 12.51
“A lush-bodied girl in the prime of her physical beauty. In an ivory georgette crepe sundress with a halter top that gathers her breasts up in soft undulating folds of the fabric. She’s standing with bare legs apart on a New York subway grating. Her blond head is thrown rapturously back as an updraft lifts her full, flaring skirt, exposing white cotton panties. White cotton! The ivory-crepe sundress is floating and filmy as magic. The dress is magic. Without the dress the girl would be female meat, raw and exposed.”
She was an all-American girl who became a…
Blue Angel: A Novel
- 2000 NBA–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.5
It’s been years since Swenson, a professor in a New England creative writing program, has published a novel.It’s been even longer since any of his students have shown promise. Enter Angela Argo, a pierced, tattooed student with a rare talent for writing. Angela is just the thing Swenson needs. And, better yet, she wants his help. But, as we all know, the road to hell is paved with good intentions…
Deliciously risque, Blue Angel is a withering take on today’s academic mores and a scathing tale that vividly shows what can happen when academic politics…
