Annal:2002 Whitbread Book Award for First Novel
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Whitbread Book Award in the year 2002. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 2002 Whitbread-1st Novel winner
- Score: 10.52
Martin Simmonds’ father tells him, “Never trust a musician when he speaks about love.” The advice comes too late. Martin already loves Dovidl Rapoport, an eerily gifted Polish violin prodigy whose parents left him in the Simmonds’s care before they perished in the Holocaust. For a time the two boys are closer than brothers. But on the day he is to make his official debut, Dovidl disappears. Only 40 years later does Martin get his first clue about what happened to him.
- 2002 LATimes–1st Fiction finalist
- 2002 Whitbread-1st Novel shortlist
- Score: 12.52
Fathered, through circuitous circumstances, by an Englishman, Pran Nath Razdan, the boy who will become the Impressionist, was passed off by his Indian mother as the child of her husband, a wealthy man of high caste. Growing up spoiled in a life of luxury just down river from the Taj Mahal, at fifteen the news of Pran’s true parentage is revealed to his father and he is tossed out into the street—a pariah and an outcast. Thus begins an extraordinary, near-mythical journey of a young man who must reinvent himself to survive—not once, but many times.
Imprisoned…
