Annal:2000 Whitbread Book Award for Novel
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Whitbread Book Award in the year 2000. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
English Passengers: A Novel
- 2000 Whitbread-Novel winner
- Score: 10.5
When Captain Illiam Quillian Kewley and his band of rum smugglers from the Isle of Man have most of their contraband—but not all—confiscated by British Customs, they are forced to put their ship Sincerity up for charter. The only takers are two eccentric Englishmen who want to embark for the other side of the globe.
The Reverend Geoffrey Wilson believes the Garden of Eden was on the island of Tasmania. His traveling partner, Dr. Thomas Potter, unbeknownst to Wilson, is developing a revolutionary, and sinister, thesis of his own, about the races of men. And…
- 2000 Booker shortlist
- 2000 Whitbread-Novel shortlist
- Score: 12.5
The maze of human memory—the ways in which we accommodate and alter it, deceive and deliver ourselves with it—is territory that Kazuo Ishiguro has made his own. In his previous novels, he has explored this inner world and its manifestations in the lives of his characters with rare inventiveness and subtlety, shrewd humor and insight. In When We Were Orphans, his first novel in five years, he returns to this terrain in a brilliantly realized story that illuminates the power of one’s past to determine the present.
Christopher Banks, an English boy born in…
- 2001 Orange shortlist
- 2000 Whitbread-Novel shortlist
- Score: 12.51
In a dazzling act of literary license, the novelist and poet Jill Dawson has transformed the sensational true story of Britain”s infamous condemned adulteress into a dramatic novel of passion, murder, and scandal, as seductive as it is shocking. One night in London in 1922, a clerk named Percy Thompson is stabbed to death as he walks home from the theater. The spectacular case that follows captures the imagination of an entire nation, as Percy”s wife, Edith, and her young lover, Frederick Bywaters, are imprisoned, summarily tried, and hanged for murder, even as a…
- 2000 Whitbread-Novel shortlist
- Score: 6.5
Anne Enright is one of Ireland’s most exciting new writers, a beguiling storyteller of warm humor and wry lyricism. In her American debut, she gives us a novel of the fierce bonds of origin and the connections and disjunctions of family that will establish her as a wise, fresh voice in fiction.
At the opening of What Are You Like? Berts, a new father, struggles to love his baby daughter, simultaneously mourning the wife who died giving her life. Raised in the shadow of his quiet grief, Maria finds herself at twenty in New York City, awash in nameless…
- 2000 Whitbread-Novel shortlist
- Score: 6.5
Will Self is a novelist of world-class stature, an unparalleled literary craftsman with a ferocious insight. In How the Dead Live, he gives us his best and most important book yet, an incisive and troubling dissection of the spiritual emptiness and death in our culture.
Lily Bloom is an aging American in final-stage cancer in the Royal Ear Hospital in Central London. Not that there’s anything wrong with her ears—it’s just the only bed they could find for her. As her two daughters buzz around her and the nurses pump her full of morphine, Lily slides in…
