Annal:2001 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in the year 2001. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
Something Like a House: A Novel
- 2001 JT Black-Fiction winner
- 2001 Whitbread-1st Novel winner
- Score: 20.51
This title is the extraordinary story of James Stuart Fraser, a British soldier who deserts during the Korean War, is captured and sent to live among the Miao, a minority tribe in the highlands of Communist China.
- 2001 JT Black-Fiction shortlist
- Score: 6.51
For thirty years, since the publication of his first novel Americana, Don DeLillo has lived in the skin of our times. He has found a voice for the forgotten souls who haunt the fringes of our culture and for its larger-than-life, real-life figures. His language is defiantly, radiantly American.
Now, to a new century, he has brought The Body Artist. In this spare, seductive novel, he inhabits the muted world of Lauren Hartke, an artist whose work defies the limits of the body. Lauren is living on a lonely coast, in a rambling rented house, where she encounters a strange, ageless man, a man with uncanny knowledge of her own life. Together they begin a journey into the wilderness of time—time, love and human perception.
As the Seattle Times said of DeLillo’s last novel, “Masterpieces teach you how to read them.” The Body Artist is a haunting, beautiful and profoundly moving novel from one of the finest writers of our time.
Atonement: A Novel
- 2002 LATimes–Fiction winner
- 2002 NBCC–Fiction winner
- 2001 Booker shortlist
- 2001 JT Black-Fiction shortlist
- 2001 Whitbread-Novel shortlist
- Score: 38.52
On the hottest day of the summer of 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her older sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching Cecilia is their housekeeper’s son Robbie Turner, a childhood friend who, along with Briony’s sister, has recently graduated from Cambridge.
By the end of that day the lives of all three will have been changed forever. Robbie and Cecilia will have crossed a boundary they had never before dared to approach and will have become victims of the younger girl’s scheming imagination. And Briony will have committed a dreadful crime, the guilt for which will color her entire life.
In each of his novels Ian McEwan has brilliantly drawn his reader into the intimate lives and situations of his characters. But never before has he worked with so large a canvas: In Atonement he takes the reader from a manor house in England in 1935 to the retreat from Dunkirk in 1941; from the London’s World War II military hospitals to a reunion of the Tallis clan in 1999.
Atonement is Ian McEwan’s…
Number9Dream: A Novel
- 2001 Booker shortlist
- 2001 JT Black-Fiction shortlist
- Score: 12.51
Number9Dream is the international literary sensation from a writer with astonishing range and imaginative energy—an intoxicating ride through Tokyo’s dark underworlds and the even more mysterious landscapes of our collective dreams.
David Mitchell follows his eerily precocious, globe-striding first novel, Ghostwritten, with a work that is in its way even more ambitious. In outward form, Number9Dream is a Dickensian coming-of-age journey: Young dreamer Eiji Miyake, from remote rural Japan, thrust out on his own by his sister’s death and his mother’s breakdown, comes to Tokyo in pursuit of the father who abandoned him. Stumbling around this strange, awesome city, he trips over and crosses—through a hidden destiny or just monstrously bad luck—a number of its secret power centers. Suddenly, the riddle of his father’s identity becomes just one of the increasingly urgent questions Eiji must answer. Why is the line between the world of his experiences and the world of his dreams so blurry? Why do so many horrible things keep happening to him? What is it about the number…
