Annal:2002 Orange Prize for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Orange Prize in the year 2002. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 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…
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…
- 2002 Orange shortlist
- Score: 6.52
A shattering and blackly funny debut in the tradition of Roddy Doyle, No Bones follows a young woman growing up in a Belfast beset by the Troubles. This is a book about feelings, family, sex, and Ireland—but don’t tell Amelia that. She’s the one growing up in the mad family, in the mad society, who doesn’t want to know what’s going on. But things are going on: eight-year-olds collecting very peculiar treasure; babies who might be, or might not be, bombs; schoolgirls bringing guns into schoolyards; and, of course, lots of food and bad, bad sex. If Amelia is…
- 2004 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- 2002 Orange shortlist
- Score: 12.54
This ambitious, groundbreaking novel takes on the taboo subject of racial hatred as it looks for the roots of violence within the family and within British society.
The Whites are an ordinary British family. Alfred White, a London park keeper, still rules his home with fierce conviction and inarticulate tenderness. May, his clever, passive wife loves Alfred but conspires against him. Their three children are no longer close; the elder son has left for America and the youngest son is a virulent racist. The daughter is involved in an interracial relationship…
- 2002 Historical Dagger winner
- 2002 Booker shortlist
- 2002 Orange shortlist
- Score: 22.52
From the author of the New York Times Notable Book Tipping the Velvet and the award-winning Affinity: a spellbinding, twisting tale of a great swindle, of fortunes and hearts won and lost, set in Victorian London among a family of thieves.
Sue Trinder is an orphan, left as an infant in the care of Mrs. Sucksby, a “baby farmer,” who raised her with unusual tenderness, as if Sue were her own. Mrs. Sucksby’s household, with its fussy babies calmed with doses of gin, also hosts a transient family of petty thieves-fingersmiths-for whom this house in the heart of a…
- 2002 Orange shortlist
- Score: 6.52
Kate Byrne is having an affair with the father of her most gifted fourth grader, Lucien. Her lover’s wife has just published Murder at Black Swan Point, a true crime story about the brutal slaying of a young adulteress in a nearby town. When Lucien begins to display violent imagery in his crayon drawings, Kate wonders how well her pupil understands his mother’s grisly work and why he’s been exposed to it. Suspecting this account of Black Swan Point’s murder to be inaccurate, Kate imagines another version of the story—for children, and narrated by…
