Annal:2004 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
From AwardAnnals
Results of the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in the year 2004. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
This Blinding Absence of Light: A Novel
Tahar Ben Jelloun, Linda Coverdale
- 2004 IMPAC Dublin winner
- Score: 10.54
Ben Jelloun crafts a horrific real-life narrative into fiction to tell the appalling story of the desert concentration camps in which King Hassan II of Morocco held his political enemies under the most harrowing conditions. Not until September 1991, under international pressure , was Hassan’s regime forced to open these desert hellholes. A handful of survivors—livng cadavers who had shrunk by over a foot in height—emerged from the six-by-three-foot cells in which they had been held underground for decades.
Working closely with one of the survivors, Ben…
The Book of Illusions: A Novel
- 2004 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- Score: 6.54
Six months after losing his wife and two young sons in an airplane crash, Vermont professor David Zimmer spends his waking hours mired in a blur of alcoholic grief and self-pity. Then, watching television one night, he stumbles upon a clip from a lost silent film by comedian Hector Mann. Zimmer’s interest is piqued, and he soon finds himself embarking on a journey around the world to research a book on this mysterious figure, who vanished from sight in 1929 and has been presumed dead for sixty years.
When the book is published the following year, a letter…
Any Human Heart: A Novel
- 2004 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- Score: 6.54
Here is the “riotous and disorganized reality” of Mountstuart’s eighty-five years in all their extraordinary, tragic and humorous aspects. The journals begin with his boyhood in Montevideo, Uruguay; then move to Oxford in the 1920s and the publication of his first book; then on to Paris (where he meets Joyce, Picasso, Hemingway, et al.) and to Spain where he covers the civil war. During World War II, we see him as an agent for Naval Intelligence, becoming embroiled in a murder scandal that involves the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. The postwar years bring him to…
Caramelo: A Novel
- 2004 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- Score: 6.54
Lala Reyes’ grandmother is descended from a family of renowned rebozo, or shawl, makers. The striped caramelo rebozo is the most beautiful of all, and the one that makes its way, like the family history it has come to represent, into Lala’s possession. The novel opens with the Reyes’ annual car trip–a caravan overflowing with children, laughter, and quarrels–from Chicago to “the other side”: Mexico City. It is there, each year, that Lala hears her family’s stories, separating the truth from the “healthy lies” that have ricocheted from one generation to the next.…
- 2003 Pulitzer–fiction winner
- 2004 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- 2003 JT Black-Fiction shortlist
- 2002 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 28.53
In the spring of 1974, Calliope Stephanides, a student at a girls’ school in Grosse Pointe, finds herself drawn to a chain-smoking, strawberry blond classmate with a gift for acting. The passion that furtively develops between them—along with Callie’s failure to develop—leads Callie to suspect that she is not like other girls. In fact, she is not really a girl at all.
The explanation for this shocking state of affairs takes us out of suburbia—back before the Detroit race riots of 1967, before the rise of the Motor City and Prohibition, to 1922, when the Turks…
- 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…
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…
Balthasar's Odyssey: A Novel
- 2004 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- Score: 6.54
Is the world coming to an end? What if, according to the Book of Revelations, next year—the year of the Beast—the Anti-christ will appear and the Apocalypse will come to pass as long predicted?
Amin Maalouf creates an ambitious tale of high adventure set at the eve of that fateful year. Balthasar Embriaco, a Genoese merchant and antique dealer living in the Levant, is thrown by chance into a quest to find a mysterious book entitled The Hundredth Name, which according to legend contains the most secret name of God. (In the Koran there are ninety-nine…
Earth and Ashes: A Novel
- 2004 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- Score: 6.54
When the Soviet army arrives in Afghanistan, the elderly Dastaguir witnesses the destruction of his village and the death of his clan. His young grandson Yassin, deaf from the sounds of the bombing, is one of the few survivors. The two set out through an unforgiving landscape, searching for the coal mine where Murad, the old man’s son and the boy’s father, works. They reach their destination only to learn that they must wait and rely for help on all that remains to them: a box of chewing tobacco, some unripe apples, and the kindness of strangers.
Haunting in…
Olga Tokarczuk, Antonia Lloyd-Jones
- 2004 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- Score: 6.54
Nowa Ruda is a small town in Silesia, an area that has been a part of Poland, Germany, and the former Czechoslovakia in the past. When the narrator moves into the area, she and discovers everyone-and everything-has its own story. With the help of Marta, her enigmatic neighbor, the narrator accumulates these stories, tracing the history of Nowa Ruda from the founding of the town to the lives of its saints, from the caller who wins the radio quiz every day to the tale of the man who causes international tension when he dies on the border, one leg on the Polish…
