Annal:2002 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
From AwardAnnals
Results of the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in the year 2002. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
The Elementary Particles: A Novel
Michel Houellebecq, Frank Wynne
- 2002 IMPAC Dublin winner
- Score: 10.52
An international literary phenomenon, The Elementary Particles is a frighteningly original novel–part Marguerite Duras and part Bret Easton Ellis-that leaps headlong into the malaise of contemporary existence.
Bruno and Michel are half-brothers abandoned by their mother, an unabashed devotee of the drugged-out free-love world of the sixties. Bruno, the older, has become a raucously promiscuous hedonist himself, while Michel is an emotionally dead molecular biologist wholly immersed in the solitude of his work. Each is ultimately offered a final chance…
- 2000 Booker winner
- 2000 Hammett winner
- 2002 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- 2001 Orange shortlist
- 2000 Governor General's finalists
- Score: 38.5
Margaret Atwood takes the art of storytelling to new heights in a dazzling new novel that unfolds layer by astonishing layer and concludes in a brilliant and wonderfully satisfying twist. For the past twenty-five years, Margaret Atwood has written works of striking originality and imagination. In The Blind Assassin, she stretches the limits of her accomplishments as never before, creating a novel that is entertaining and profoundly serious. The novel opens with these simple, resonant words: “Ten days after the war ended, my sister drove a car off the bridge.”
True History of the Kelly Gang: A Novel
- 2001 Booker winner
- 2002 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- Score: 16.51
Out of nineteenth-century Australia rides a hero of his people and a man for all nations, in this masterpiece by the Booker Prize-winning author of Oscar and Lucinda and Jack Maggs. Exhilarating, hilarious, panoramic, and immediately engrossing, it is also—at a distance of many thousand miles and more than a century—a Great American Novel.
This is Ned Kelly’s true confession, in his own words and written on the run for an infant daughter he has never seen. To the authorities, this son of dirt-poor Irish immigrants was a born thief and,…
The Keepers of Truth: A Novel
- 2002 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- 2000 Booker shortlist
- Score: 12.52
The last of a manufacturing dynasty in a dying industrial town, Bill lives alone in the family mansion and works for the Truth, the moribund local paper. He yearns to write long philosophical pieces about the American dream gone sour, not the flaccid write-ups of bake-off contests demanded by the Truth. Then, old man Lawton goes missing, and suspicion fixes on his son, Ronny. Paradoxically, the specter of violent death breathes new life into the town. For Bill, a deeper and more disturbing involvement with the Lawtons ensues. The Lawton murder and…
The Last Samurai: A Novel
- 2002 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- 2000 LATimes–1st Fiction finalist
- Score: 12.52
This is the story of a single mother, Sibylla, who comes from a long line of frustrated talents, and her son Ludo, who just happens to be a genius. Obsessed with the film The Seventh Samurai, she makes it a running backdrop to Ludo’s childhood. At five Ludo learns ancient Greek, reading Homer as they travel round and round on the London Underground, teaches himself Hebrew, Arabic, Inuit, probability theory, astronomy, and is moving on to Japanese when he decides to embark on the search for his father—preferably the perfect father in the heroic mould, or at…
The Years with Laura Díaz: A Novel
Carlos Fuentes, Alfred MacAdam
- 2002 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- 2000 Kiriyama-Fiction finalist
- Score: 12.52
In this radiant hope-filled new novel, Carlos Fuentes gives us a richly painted portrait of the twentieth century as seen through the eyes of Laura Díaz—a woman who becomes as much a part of our history as of the Mexican history she observes and helps to create. Filled with brilliantly colored scenes and heartbreaking dramas, the epic story of The Years with Laura Díaz is also a novel of subtle and penetrating psychological insight.
As in Fuentes’s masterpiece The Death of Artemio Cruz, the action begins in the state of Veracruz and then moves…
Madame: A Novel
Antoni Libera, Agnieszka Kolakowska
- 2002 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- Score: 6.52
Madame is an unexpected gem: a novel about Poland during the grim years of Soviet-controlled mediocrity, which nonetheless sparkles with light and warmth.
Our young narrator-hero is suffering through the regulated boredom of high school when he is transfixed by a new teacher—an elegant “older woman” (she is thirty-two) who bewitches him with her glacial beauty and her strict intelligence. He resolves to learn everything he can about her and to win her heart.
In a sequence of marvelously funny but sobering maneuvers, he learns much more than he…
