Annal:2001 Whitbread Book Award for Novel
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Whitbread Book Award in the year 2001. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 2001 Whitbread-Novel winner
- Score: 10.51
Twelve Bar Blues is an epic tale of fate and family, jazz and juju that spans three continents and two centuries to tell a story of enduring roots and indelible love. At its heart is Lick Holden, a talented but tormented young musician who sets the jazz scene of early-twentieth-century New Orleans on fire with the hot tones of his coronet. But Lick’s true passion is for his beautiful lost stepsister, for whom he searches among the streets, music halls, and bordellos of the South. Their story reverberates through the decades into the life of Sylvia Di…
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.
Atonement is Ian McEwan’s finest achievement. Brilliant and utterly enthralling in its depiction of childhood, love and war, England and class, the novel is at its center a profound–and profoundly moving–exploration of shame and forgiveness and the difficulty of absolution.
- 2001 Booker shortlist
- 2001 Whitbread-Novel shortlist
- Score: 12.51
It is the summer of 1997. Alec Valentine is returning to England to care for his ailing mother, Alice, a task that only reinforces his deep sense of inadequacy. In San Francisco, his older brother Larry prepares to come home as well, preoccupied with an acting career that is sliding toward sleaze and a marriage that is faltering. In Paris, on the other hand, the Hungarian playwright Lászlo Lázár seems to have it all—critical acclaim, a loving boyfriend, and a close circle of friends—yet even he is haunted by guilt and tragedy. For each of them the time has come…
The Siege: A Novel
- 2002 Orange shortlist
- 2001 Whitbread-Novel shortlist
- Score: 12.52
The Siege is Helen Dunmore’s masterpiece. Her canvas is monumental—the Nazis’ 1941 winter siege on Leningrad that killed six hundred thousand—but her focus is heartrendingly intimate. One family, the Levins, fights to stay alive in their small apartment, held together by the unlikely courage and resourcefulness of twenty-two-year-old Anna. Though she dreams of an artist’s life, she must instead forage for food in the ever more desperate city and watch her little brother grow cruelly thin. Their father, a blacklisted writer who once advocated a robust life…
