Annal:2004 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First 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:
- 2004 LATimes–1st Fiction winner
- Score: 10.54
A powerful first novel that engages the tumultuous events of today: at once an intimate portrait of a group of young Arab Muslims living in the United States, and the story of one man’s journey into—and out of—violence.
We first meet Aziz Arkoun as a 24-year-old stowaway—frozen, hungry, his perceptions jammed by a language he can’t understand or speak. After 52 days in the hold of a tanker from Algeria, he jumps into the icy waters of Boston harbor and swims to shore. Seemingly rescued from isolation by Algerians he knew as a child, he instead finds himself in…
Eve Green: A Novel
- 2004 Whitbread-1st Novel winner
- 2004 LATimes–1st Fiction finalist
- Score: 16.54
“Ten days before Christmas I lost her. What do I remember? Every little thing…. For twenty-one years I’ve picked away at my memory of it, lifting up moments, testing myself. Believing I might have finally healed to a neat white scar.”
Pregnant with her first child, Eve Green recalls her mother’s death when she was eight years old and her struggle to make sense of her parents’ mysterious romantic past. Eve is sent to live with her grandparents in rural Wales, where she finds comfort in friendships with Daniel, a quiet farmhand, and…
A Girl Becomes a Comma Like That: A Novel
- 2004 LATimes–1st Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.54
Hauntingly observant and insightful, this poignant debut novel delves into the intricate bonds between mothers and daughters and offers an unflinching, darkly funny look at the relationships between love, sex, and death.
Rachel Spark is an irreverent, sexually eager, financially unstable thirty-year-old college instructor who moves back home when her mother is diagnosed with terminal breast cancer. As she tries to ease her mother, a perpetually cheerful woman, toward the inevitable, Rachel turns from one man to the next—sometimes comically, sometimes…
Rear View: Stories
- 2004 LATimes–1st Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.54
Starkly honest, gritty, and at times darkly humorous, the fourteen stories in Pete Duval’s debut collection feature blue-collar workers, lapsed Catholics, bullies, and smalltime thieves struggling with their jobs, their relationships, and their families. Like the fiction of Richard Russo and Andre Dubus, many of Duval’s stories deal with both mundane and unexpected occurrences in a small working-class community.
In “Wheatback,” a visitor sits in the dark in a nursing home and has a strangely intimate conversation with a patient he has just met. “Bakery” gives…
- 2004 Governor General's finalists
- 2004 LATimes–1st Fiction finalist
- Score: 12.54
Few readers had heard of David Bezmozgis before last May, when Harper’s, Zoetrope, and The New Yorker all printed stories from his forthcoming collection. In the space of a few weeks, these magazines introduced America to the Bermans—Bella and Roman and their son, Mark—Russian Jews who have fled the Riga of Brezhnev for Toronto, the city of their dreams.
Told through Mark’s eyes, and spanning the last twenty-three years, Natasha brings the Bermans and the Russian-Jewish enclaves of Toronto to life in stories full of big, desperate, utterly…
