Annal:2002 Kiriyama Prize for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Kiriyama Prize in the year 2002. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
Family Matters: A Novel
- 2002 Kiriyama-Fiction winner
- 2004 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- 2002 Booker shortlist
- 2002 JT Black-Fiction shortlist
- Score: 28.52
Rohinton Mistry’s enthralling novel is at once a domestic drama and an intently observed portrait of present-day Bombay in all its vitality and corruption. At the age of seventy-nine, Nariman Vakeel, already suffering from Parkinson’s disease, breaks an ankle and finds himself wholly dependent on his family. His step-children, Coomy and Jal, have a spacious apartment (in the inaptly named Chateau Felicity), but are too squeamish and resentful to tend to his physical needs.
Nariman must now turn to his younger daughter, Roxana, her husband, Yezad, and their two sons, who share a small, crowded home. Their decision will test not only their material resources but, in surprising ways, all their tolerance, compassion, integrity, and faith. Sweeping and intimate, tragic and mirthful, Family Matters is a work of enormous emotional power.
Red Poppies: A Novel of Tibet
Alai, Howard Goldblatt, Sylvia Li-chun Lin
- 2002 Kiriyama-Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.52
Ambitious, beautifully told, filled with intriguing characters, panoramic settings, and high drama, Red Poppies opens a window on a unique region of pre-occupation Tibet, dispelling many of the popular myths about a uniformly pacifistic society peopled by devout worshipers. Set in the eastern part of the country, whose autocratic chieftains received their power to govern from Chinese emperors in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties, this novel is about a feudal society in full, hot-house bloom. Lavish, sensual lifestyles, passionate romance, and bloody feuds take center stage in a sweeping historical tale that does for Tibet what the works of Garcia Marquez have done for Colombia and of Faulkner have done for the American South.
Red Poppies is the story of the Maichi family, its powerful chieftain, his Han Chinese wife, his first son and presumptive heir, and his second, “idiot, “ son, the novel’s narrator and unlikely hero. The time is the 1930s, the setting a stone fortress overlooking all the family rules, the arid plains of eastern Tibet, and a thinly scattered populous…
Melal: A Novel of the Pacific
- 2002 Kiriyama-Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.52
On Good Friday, 1981, Rujen Keju and his two sons come face to face with their complicated inheritance—one that includes years of atomic testing and the continued military presence of the U.S. in the Pacific.
In this highly original work of history and adventure, novelist Robert Barclay weaves together characters and stories from mythological times with those of the present-day to give readers a rare and unsparing look at life in the contemporary Pacific.
Dirt Music: A Novel
- 2002 Booker shortlist
- 2002 Kiriyama-Fiction finalist
- Score: 12.52
Luther Fox, a loner, haunted by his past, makes his living as an illegal fisherman—a shamateur. Before everyone in his family was killed in a freak rollover, he grew melons and played guitar in the family band. Robbed of all that, he has turned his back on music. There’s too much emotion in it, too much memory and pain.
One morning Fox is observed poaching by Georgie Jutland. Chance, or a kind of willed recklessness, has brought Georgie into the life and home of Jim Buckridge, the most prosperous fisherman in the area and a man who loathes poachers, Fox above all. But she’s never fully settled into Jim’s grand house on the water or into the inbred community with its history of violent secrets. After Georgie encounters Fox, her tentative hold on conventional life is severed. Neither of them would call it love, but they can’t stay away from each other no matter how dangerous it is—and out on White Point it is very dangerous.
Set in the dramatic landscape of Western Australia, Dirt Music is a love story about people stifled by grief and regret; a novel about the odds of…
The Girl From the Coast: A Novel
Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Willem Samuels
- 2002 Kiriyama-Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.52
In a poor coastal fishing village, a beautiful girl unknowingly attracts the attention of a local aristocrat. Before she knows it, she is forced to marry this man she has never seen and leave behind all that is familiar to her—her carefree days spent helping her mother with daily tasks, dreamily listening to the sounds of the wind and the waves, and watching boats come and go. She is taken away to her husband’s manor in the city and plunged into a strange world of opulence and quiet severity.
Gradually the Girl from the Coast grows acclimated to the ways of the household but becomes increasingly plagued by doubts. Where does her husband go for days on end? What does he really think of her? Why is everyone so afraid of him? Too timid to ask him these kinds of questions directly she repeatedly turns to the maidservant who has been assigned to her; and it is from her conversations with this older woman that the girl begins to understand the truth about her new life.
What follows is a tale of a young woman’s journey down a lonely and painful path to maturity. Along the way, she confronts…
