Annal:2001 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the National Book Critics Circle Award in the year 2001. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 2001 NBCC–Fiction winner
- Score: 10.51
Over the course of a thirty-year conversation unfolding in train stations and travelers’ stops across England and Europe, W.G. Sebald’s unnamed narrator and Jacques Austerlitz discuss Austerlitz’s ongoing efforts to understand who he is. An orphan who came to England alone in the summer of 1939 and was raised by a Welsh Methodist minister and his wife as their own, Austerlitz grew up with no conscious memory of where he came from.
W.G. Sebald embodies in Austerlitz the universal human search for identity, the struggle to impose coherence on memory, a…
- 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…
- 2002 Pulitzer–fiction finalist
- 2001 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- 2001 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 18.52
Immortalized in folk ballads, John Henry has been a favorite American hero since the mid-nineteenth century. According to legend, John Henry, a black laborer for the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad, was a man of superhuman strength and stamina. He proved his mettle in a contest with a steam drill, only to die of exhaustion moments after his triumph.
In John Henry Days, Colson Whitehead transforms the simple ballad into a contrapuntal masterpiece. The narrative revolves around the story of J. Sutter, a young black journalist. Sutter is a “junketeer,” a…
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories
- 2001 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- 2001 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 12.51
A superb new collection from one of our best and best-loved writers. Nine stories draw us immediately into that special place known as Alice Munro territory–a place where an unexpected twist of events or a suddenly recaptured memory can illumine the arc of an entire life.
The fate of a strong-minded housekeeper with a “frizz of reddish hair,” just entering the dangerous country of old-maidhood, is unintentionally (and deliciously) reversed by a teenaged girl’s practical joke. A college student visiting her aunt for the first time and recognizing the family…
- 2002 Orange winner
- 2002 PEN-faulkner winner
- 2003 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- 2001 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 32.52
Somewhere in South America, at the home of the country’s vice president, a lavish birthday party is being held in honor of Mr. Hosokawa, a powerful Japanese businessman. Roxanne Coss, opera’s most revered soprano, has mesmerized the international guests with her singing. It is a perfect evening—until a band of gun-wielding terrorists breaks in through the air-conditioning vents and takes the entire party hostage. But what begins as a panicked, life-threatening scenario slowly evolves into something quite different, as terrorists and hostages forge unexpected…
