Annal:2001 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
From AwardAnnals
Results of the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in the year 2001. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
No Great Mischief: A Novel
- 2001 IMPAC Dublin winner
- Score: 10.51
In 1779 Calum MacDonald set sail in exile from the Highlands of Scotland with his wife and twelve children, along with the dog who would not be left behind and swam after the departing boat. After a catastrophic crossing he landed in the New World at Cape Breton, by which time he had become a widower and a grandfather.
Two hundred years later, another MacDonald tells the story of coming of age in that same bleak Cape Breton landscape. Alexander is orphaned by a cruel accident on the ice, and his yearning for connection with family produces two of the most…
The True History of Paradise: A Novel
- 2001 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- Score: 6.51
Easter, 1981, and Jamaica’s in a state of emergency. With violence in the streets and a government about to collapse, the Landing family gathers to bury one of its own. For Monica Landing, the proud, imperious matriarch who had not spoken to her daughter in fifteen years, the death of Lana Landing is the cruelest kind of loss. For Lana’s younger sister, Jean, it is a tragedy she cannot comprehend. All she knows is that her beloved homeland, with its blue mountains and exuberant flora, its rich African rhythms and crashing ocean waves, holds no future for…
- 2001 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- Score: 6.51
Marcela, the heroine of the novel, is a modern, professional woman in her forties sifting through her disappointment after a brief, but intense, extra-marital affair. As the novel opens, Marcela is in the town of San Lázaro, the home town of her forebears, not only to pick up the pieces of her life but also to discover the secret past of her parents. Set in Mexico in 1994, Mexico’s last elections, the Mayan insurrection in Chiapas and the assassination of presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio serve not only as backdrop, but also parallel the emotional vicissitudes in Marcela’s own life.
- 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…
Victor Pelevin, Andrew Bromfield
- 2001 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- Score: 6.51
The Clay Machine-Gun is a novel rich in hilarious paradox. Pelevin himself has described it as “the first novel in world literature which takes place in an absolute void”. Controversially denied the Russian Booker Prize—the Jury President branded it as a kind of “computer virus designed to destroy the cultural memory”—the book became a huge cult success in Russia.
The Clay Machine-Gun is a nightmarish fantasy about identity, crime and Russian history. The action cuts deliriously between present-day Moscow and 1919, the era of the Civil War, in…
The Blackwater Lightship: A Novel
- 2001 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- 1999 Booker shortlist
- Score: 12.51
A beautifully written, deeply resonant story about three generations of an estranged family reuniting to mourn a tragic, untimely death—from the author Nick Hornby called “one of the most promising novelists writing in the English language.”
It is Ireland in the early 1990s. Helen, her mother Lily, and her grandmother Dora have come together, after a decade of estrangement, to tend to Helen’s beloved brother, Declan, who is dying of AIDS. Under the crumbling roof of Dora’s old house in Ireland, Declans’ two friends join the women as each waits for the end.…
