Annal:2001 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the year 2001. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
The Dark Room: A Novel
- 2001 LATimes–1st Fiction winner
- 2001 Booker shortlist
- Score: 16.51
A debut novel that retells the history of twentieth-century Germany through the experiences of three ordinary Germans.
Helmut: A boy born with a physical deformity finds work as a photographer’s assistant during the 1930s and captures on film the changing temper of Berlin, the city he loves. But his acute photographic eye never provides him with the power to understand the significance of what he sees through his camera. . . . Lore: In the weeks following Germany’s surrender, a teenage girl whose parents are both in Allied captivity takes her younger siblings on a terrifying, illegal journey through the four zones of occupation in search of her grandmother. . . . Micha: Many years after the war, a young man trying to discover why the Russians imprisoned his grandfather for nine years after the war meets resistance at every turn; the only person who agrees, reluctantly, to help him is compromised by his own past.
The Dark Room evokes the experiences of the individual with astonishing emotional depth and psychological authenticity. With dazzling originality and to profound effect,…
- 2001 LATimes–1st Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.51
My Dream of You is the story of Kathleen de Burca, an Irish woman based in London, a travel writer who crisscrosses the globe. She is a woman on the run until a quick series of blows, on the eve of a milestone birthday, stops her cold-revealing the painful cost of her refugee existence and the encroaching despair that the love she believed would deliver her might never come. And still, she feels, her heart is ridiculously alive…
And so it is to passion that Kathleen turns when she sets out for Ireland to investigate the true story of a scandalous affair between the wife of an English landlord and an Irish servant during the latter years of the Famine. Between the lines of the historical record and through a reconsideration of the family she fled so long ago, Kathleen attempts to understand how it is that even in the face of adversity love can prevail and even with love families can be torn apart. During her time in the country, she encounters a lover of her own who helps her to know her own heart and presents her with an ultimate choice that, like the one made by her nineteenth-century…
Crawling At Night: A Novel
- 2001 LATimes–1st Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.51
Crawling at Night is a darkly lyrical, charged exploration of the double-edged sword of urban anonymity. Nani Power brilliantly paints a cityscape like no other and makes visible the people often condemned to its shadows: in late-night Chinatown clubs; in downtown restaurants after the CLOSED sign goes up; and behind the closed doors of small studio apartments in the city’s high-rises and walk-ups. This searing, unforgettable portrait of New York City and of the appetites and self-sabotaging patterns of its displaced inhabitants introduces a remarkable new storyteller.
Ito is a literate yet tongue-tied sushi chef who recites haiku in his head as he labors over shopping lists, which at once define and confine him. Alone in his apartment at night, he reads pornographic comics while dreaming of Mariane, a lost, alcoholic waitress who works with him at a Chelsea sushi bar. Ito’s loneliness is punctuated by flashbacks of his life in Japan, of the dead wife whom he betrayed, as well as of his beloved mistress, Xiu-Xiu.
Across town, Mariane lies in her bath with a drink in her hand,…
The Death of Vishnu: A Novel
- 2002 PEN-faulkner finalist
- 2001 Kiriyama-Fiction finalist
- 2001 LATimes–1st Fiction finalist
- Score: 18.52
- 2001 LATimes–1st Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.51
Oskar Voxlauer is in flight from his past—from his bourgeois Austrian upbringing; from horrific memories of fighting on the Italian front in 1917 as a teenage recruit; and from the twenty years he has spent in the Ukraine watching his socialist ideals crumble and the life of the woman he loved slowly waste away. Alone, he finally decides to return to the Austrian village of his birth, where his mother is waiting to greet a son she hasn’t seen since he was a boy.
But the year is 1938, and despite Oskar’s attempt to live a reclusive existence as a gamekeeper in the hills, he cannot escape the tensions that are threatening the once tranquil village of Niessen. Hitler marches into Austria and the Black Shirts come to the valley. Voxlauer watches as his Jewish friend and benefactor is driven to ruin. The only things saving him—a “Red,” a deserter and a “Yid lover”—from the attentions of the SS seem to be the respect the community has for his parents and his growing love for the mysterious Else Bauer, cousin of the new SS Führer.
In his extraordinary first novel, John Wray…
