Annal:2004 National Book Award for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the National Book Award in the year 2004. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
The News from Paraguay: A Novel
- 2004 NBA–Fiction winner
- Score: 10.54
For him it began with a bright blue parrot feather that fell from Ella Lynch’s hat when she was horseback riding in the Bois de Boulogne. The year was 1854, and Francisco Solano Lopez—“Franco,” the future dictator of Paraguay—began his courtship of the young, beautiful Irishwoman with a poncho, a Paraguayan band, and a horse named Mathilde.
From Paris, Ella Lynch follows Franco to Asunción, where she reigns as his mistress. Isolated and estranged in this new world, she embraces her lover’s ill-fated dream—one fueled by outsize imperial ambition and heedless…
- 2004 NBA–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.54
When a girl falls into a deep and impenetrable sleep, the borders between her provincial French village and the peculiar, beguiling realm of her dreams begin to disappear: A fat woman sprouts delicate wings and takes flight; a failed photographer stumbles into the role of pornographer; a beautiful young wife grows to resemble her husband’s viol. And in their midst travels Madeleine, the dreamer, who is trying to make sense of her own metamorphosis.
Part fairy tale, part coming-of-age story, this enchantingly inventive novel follows Madeleine as she leaves…
- 2004 NBA–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.54
Florida is the portrait of the artist as a young woman, an orphan’s story full of loss and wonder, a familiar tale told in original language. Alice Fivey, fatherless at age seven, is left in the care of her relatives at ten when her love-wearied mother loses custody of her and submits to the sanitarium and years of psychiatric care. A namesake daughter locked in the orphan’s move-around life, she must hold still while the seamstress pins her into someone not her mother. But they share the same name, so she is her mother, isn’t she?
Alice finds…
Ideas of Heaven: A Ring of Stories
- 2004 NBA–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.54
Supple and precise, these stories cover lifetimes, much in the manner of Alice Munro and William Trevor. Set in France, Italy, New York, and China, in the past and present, they are about longings—about how sex and religion become parallel forms of dedication and comfort.
Though the stories stand alone, a minor element in one becomes major in the next. In “My Shape,” a woman is taunted by her dance coach, who later suffers his own heartache. A Venetian poet of the 1500s, another storyteller, is introduced to a modern traveler reading Rilke. His story precedes…
Our Kind: A Novel in Stories
- 2004 NBA–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.54
From the award-winning author of The Gardens of Kyoto comes this witty and incisive novel about the lives and attitudes of a group of women—once country-club housewives; today divorced, independent, and breaking the rules.
In Our Kind, Kate Walbert masterfully conveys the dreams and reality of a group of women who came into the quick rush of adulthood, marriage, and child-bearing during the 1950s. Narrating from the heart of ten companions, Walbert subtly depicts all the anger, disappointment, vulnerability, and pride of her characters: “Years…
