Annal:2000 Whitbread Book Award for First Novel
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Whitbread Book Award in the year 2000. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
White Teeth: A Novel
- 2000 JT Black-Fiction winner
- 2000 Whitbread-1st Novel winner
- 2000 LATimes–1st Fiction finalist
- 2000 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- 2000 Orange shortlist
- Score: 38.5
On New Year’s morning, 1975, Archie Jones sits in his car on a London road and waits for the exhaust fumes to fill his Cavalier Musketeer station wagon. Archie—working-class, ordinary, a failed marriage under his belt—is calling it quits, the deciding factor being the flip of a 20-pence coin. When the owner of a nearby halal butcher shop (annoyed that Archie’s car is blocking his delivery area) comes out and bangs on the window, he gives Archie another chance at life and sets in motion this richly imagined, uproariously funny novel.
Epic and intimate,…
- 2000 Whitbread-1st Novel shortlist
- Score: 6.5
Isserley picks up hitchhikers with big muscles. She, herself, is tiny-like a kid peering up over the steering wheel. She has a remarkable face and wears the thickest corrective lenses anyone has ever seen. Her posture is suggestive of some spinal problem. Her breasts are perfect; perhaps implants. She is strangely erotic yet somehow grotesque, vulnerable yet threatening. Her hitchhikers are a mixed bunch of men-trailer trash and travelling postgrads, thugs and philosophers. But Isserley is only interested in whether they have families and whether they have…
- 2000 Whitbread-1st Novel shortlist
- Score: 6.5
Born Free tells the story of an ordinary family who are all trying to escape from something…and each other.
The interactions between Jake, Joni, Angie and Vic reveal a hellish cocktail of adolescent and mid-life crises; the savagery of sibling rivalry; the waking nightmare of a marriage gone cold—and, naturally, the unbridgeable, infernal chasm between the generations. It’s a story of everyday life.
