Annal:2003 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the year 2003. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
Train: A Novel
- 2003 LATimes–Fiction winner
- Score: 10.53
Los Angeles, 1953. Lionel Walk is a young black caddy at Brookline, the oldest, most exclusive country club in the city, where he is known by the nickname “Train.” A troubled, keenly intelligent kid with no particular interest in his own prodigious talent for the game, he keeps his head down and his mouth shut as he navigates his way between the careless hostility of his “totes” and the explosive brutality of the other caddies.
Miller Packard, a sergeant with the San Diego police department, first appears on the boy’s horizon as a distracted gambler, bored…
- 2004 PEN-faulkner finalist
- 2003 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- 2003 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 18.54
The author of the genre-defining memoir This Boy’s Life, the PEN/Faulkner Award–winning novella The Barracks Thief, and short stories acclaimed as modern classics, Tobias Wolff now gives us his first novel.
Determined to fit in at his New England prep school, the narrator has learned to mimic the bearing and manners of his adoptive tribe while concealing as much as possible about himself. His final year, however, unravels everything he’s achieved, and steers his destiny in directions no one could have predicted.
The school’s mystique is rooted…
- 2003 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.53
Sherman Alexie is one of today’s most captivating and popular writers—The Nation has called him “a master of language, writing beautifully, unsparingly, and straight to the heart.” Now with Ten Little Indians he offers nine poignant and emotionally resonant new stories about Native Americans who, like all Americans, find themselves at personal and cultural crossroads, faced with heart-rending, tragic, sometimes wondrous moments of being that test their loyalties, their capacities, and their notions of who they are and who they love.
What kind of…
- 2003 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.53
How do people live in this world? is a question that seems to hover, alongside the Hollywood sign, over the neighborhood of Los Feliz. Certainly Pete Ross wonders as much, his run as a successful chef, husband, and father having imploded so spectacularly as to land him back in the fraught care of his mother. Similarly, Alice Black’s life–hinging as it does on a married boyfriend–is yet pending, and Helen Harland’s ministry has thus far failed to enchant her new congregants. Meanwhile, at the retirement home down the street, Alice’s aunt Kate lives in a…
The Namesake: A Novel
- 2003 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.53
Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies established this young writer as one the most brilliant of her generation. Her stories are one of the very few debut works—and only a handful of collections—to have won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Among the many other awards and honors it received were the New Yorker Debut of the Year award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, and the highest critical praise for its grace, acuity, and compassion in detailing lives transported from India to America.
In The Namesake, Lahiri enriches the themes that made her…
