Annal:2001 National Book Award for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the National Book Award in the year 2001. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 2002 JT Black-Fiction winner
- 2001 NBA–Fiction winner
- 2003 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- 2002 PEN-faulkner finalist
- 2002 Pulitzer–fiction finalist
- 2001 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- 2001 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 50.52
Enid Lambert is terribly, terribly anxious. Although she would never admit it to her neighbors or her three grown children, her husband, Alfred, is losing his grip on reality. Maybe it’s the medication that Alfred takes for his Parkinson’s disease, or maybe it’s his negative attitude, but he spends his days brooding in the basement and committing shadowy, unspeakable acts. More and more often, he doesn’t seem to understand a word Enid says.
Trouble is also brewing in the lives of Enid’s children. Her older son, Gary, a banker in Philadelphia, has turned cruel…
- 2001 NBA–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.51
In this haunting, bracing new collection, Dan Chaon shares stories of men, women, and children who live far outside the American Dream, while wondering which decision, which path, or which accident brought them to this place. Chaon imagines today’s family instinctively trying to stay together, only to find itself lost in the throes of a chaotic, modern world.
In “Safety Man,” a young widow and her children become increasingly attached to an inflatable protector-doll, as the world outside seems to grow ever more threatening; “Big Me” follows a lonely,…
- 2001 NBA–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.51
At the start of this edgy and ambitiously multilayered novel, a fashion model named Charlotte Swenson emerges from a car accident in her Illinois hometown with her face so badly shattered that it takes eighty titanium screws to reassemble it. She returns to New York still beautiful but oddly unrecognizable, a virtual stranger in the world she once effortlessly occupied.
With the surreal authority of a David Lynch, Jennifer Egan threads Charlotte’s narrative with those of other casualties of our infatuation with the image. There’s a deceptively plain teenaged…
The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse: A Novel
- 2001 NBA–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.51
For more than a half century, Father Damien Modeste has served his beloved people, the Ojibwe, on the remote reservation of Little No Horse. Compelled to his task by a direct mystical experience, Father Damien has made enormous sacrifices, and experienced the joys of commitment as well as deep suffering. Now, nearing the end of his life, Father Damien dreads the discovery of his physical identity, for he is a woman who has lived as a man. He imagines the undoing of all that he has accomplished—sees unions unsundered, baptisms nullified, those who confessed to him…
Highwire Moon: A Novel
- 2001 NBA–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.51
Serafina is an illegal migrant worker living in California when the police catch her and send her back to Mexico–without her three-year old daughter. Twelve years later, with a pair of silver barrettes her only tangible memory of Elvia, Serafina begins a harrowing journey back across the border to find her daughter. At the same time Elvia, now fifteen and pregnant, resolves to track her mother down. They travel a landscape populated by desperately poor migrants moving from harvest to harvest, truckers living hand-to-mouth in seedy motels, and lost children in…
