Annal:2004 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the year 2004. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 2006 IMPAC Dublin winner
- 2004 LATimes–Fiction winner
- 2004 Booker shortlist
- Score: 26.56
Like Michael Cunningham in The Hours, Colm Tóibín captures the extraordinary mind and heart of a great writer. Brilliant and profoundly moving, The Master tells the story of Henry James, a man born into one of America’s first intellectual families two decades before the Civil War. James left his country to live in Paris, Rome, Venice, and London among privileged artists and writers.
In stunningly resonant prose, Tóibín captures the loneliness and longing, the hope and despair of a man who never married, never resolved his sexual identity, and…
GraceLand: A Novel
- 2006 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- 2004 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- Score: 12.56
In this dazzling debut by a singular new talent, the sprawling, swampy, cacophonous city of Lagos, Nigeria, provides the backdrop to the story of Elvis, a teenage Elvis impersonator hoping to make his way out of the ghetto. Broke, beset by floods, and beatings by his alcoholic father, and with no job opportunities in sight, Elvis is tempted by a life of crime. Thus begins his odyssey into the dangerous underworld of Lagos, guided by his friend Redemption and accompanied by a restless hybrid of voices including The King of Beggars, Sunday, Innocent and Comfort.…
Gilead: A Novel
- 2005 Pulitzer–fiction winner
- 2004 NBCC–Fiction winner
- 2005 PEN-faulkner finalist
- 2004 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- Score: 32.55
In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames’s life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Ames is the son of an Iowan preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young man in Maine, saw a vision of Christ bound in chains and came west to Kansas to fight for abolition: He “preached men into the Civil War,” then, at age fifty, became a chaplain in the Union Army, losing his right eye in battle. Reverend Ames writes to his son about the tension between his father—an ardent pacifist—and his grandfather, whose pistol and…
- 2004 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.54
Russell Banks has exhibited an astonishingly imaginative range throughout his distinguished career as a novelist, and his uniquely realistic American voice, on display in such modern classics as Rule of the Bone and Continental Drift, continues to shine in this latest effort. Fans and newcomers alike will be rewarded by his incisive eye for character and his ability to deliver a relentless and engaging narrative—always in the service of his inimitable style.
The Darling is Hannah Musgrave’s story, told emotionally and convincingly years…
Honored Guest: Stories
- 2004 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.54
The first collection of stories in well over a decade by a writer Ann Beattie has called “one of our most remarkable storytellers,” and whom Bret Easton Ellis has named “the rightful heir to the mastery, genius, and poetry of Flannery O’Connor.”
These twelve stories further Joy Williams’s utterly singular achievement, described by the Washington Post as “poetic, disturbing, yet very funny… the brilliantly controlled style informed by a powerful spiritual vision,” and again reveal her ability to uncover, as Michiko Kakutani wrote in the New York Times,…
