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…
- 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…
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…
The Death of Vishnu: A Novel
- 2002 PEN-faulkner finalist
- 2001 Kiriyama-Fiction finalist
- 2001 LATimes–1st Fiction finalist
- Score: 18.52
At the opening of this masterful debut novel, Vishnu lies dying on the staircase he inhabits while his neighbors the Pathaks and the Asranis argue over who will pay for an ambulance. As the action spirals up through the floors of the apartment building we are pulled into the drama of the residents’ lives: Mr. Jalal’s obsessive search for higher meaning; Vinod Taneja’s longing for the wife he has lost; the comic elopement of Kavita Asrani, who fancies herself the heroine of a Hindi movie. Suffused with Hindu mythology, this story of one apartment building becomes…
- 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…
