Annal:2005 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
From AwardAnnals
Results of the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in the year 2005. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 2005 IMPAC Dublin winner
- 2004 Pulitzer–fiction winner
- 2003 NBCC–Fiction winner
- 2003 NBA–Fiction finalist
- Score: 36.55
Henry Townsend, a black farmer, bootmaker, and former slave, has a fondness for Paradise Lost and an unusual mentor—William Robbins, perhaps the most powerful man in antebellum Virginia’s Manchester County. Under Robbins’s tutelage, Henry becomes proprietor of his own plantation—as well as of his own slaves. When he dies, his widow, Caldonia, succumbs to profound grief, and things begin to fall apart at their plantation: slaves take to escaping under the cover of night, and families who had once found love beneath the weight of slavery begin to betray one…
The Great Fire: A Novel
- 2003 NBA–Fiction winner
- 2005 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- 2004 Kiriyama-Fiction finalist
- 2004 Orange shortlist
- Score: 28.53
The Great Fire is Shirley Hazzard’s first novel since The Transit of Venus, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1981. The conflagration of her title is the Second World War. In war-torn Asia and stricken Europe, men and women, still young but veterans of harsh experience, must reinvent their lives and expectations, and learn, from their past, to dream again. Some will fulfill their destinies, others will falter. At the center of the story, a brave and brilliant soldier finds that survival and worldly achievement are not enough. His…
The Fortress of Solitude: A Novel
- 2005 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- Score: 6.55
This is the story of two boys, Dylan Ebdus and Mingus Rude. They are friends and neighbors, but because Dylan is white and Mingus is black, their friendship is not simple. This is the story of their Brooklyn neighborhood, which is almost exclusively black despite the first whispers of something that will become known as “gentrification.”
This is the story of 1970s America, a time when the most simple human decisions—what music you listen to, whether to speak to the kid in the seat next to you, whether to give up your lunch money—are laden with potential…
- 2005 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- Score: 6.55
Gardening at Night follows the unfolding of a young girl’s life through a childhood filled with silences, through adolescence and young womanhood. It is about how much people are the total of their longings, how high drama can also be low comedy. It probes how much of the old century a girl should take with her into the new one, and examines the merging of families in the Eighties and their emerging into the florescence of the Nineties and beyond. It is especially the story of a girl’s escape from a ghost town. The South African mining town of Kimberley…
The Half Brother: A Novel
Lars Saabye Christensen, Kenneth Steven
- 2005 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- Score: 6.55
The Half Brother is a truly gripping, epic novel, hugely ambitious in scope and utterly compelling, a wonderful mixture of surreal comedy and touching intimacy. In stunning detail and elegant prose it relates the lives of four generations of a far from ordinary family. It opens on May 8, 1945, when 20-year-old Vera, hoping to celebrate with her mother and grandmother the end of World War II, is brutally raped by an unknown assailant. From that crime is born a boy named Fred, a misfit who later becomes a boxer. Barnum, Vera’s other son born several years…
- 2005 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- 2003 Booker shortlist
- Score: 12.55
A taut, intense tale of the dashed hopes of the post-apartheid era and the small betrayals that doom a friendship, The Good Doctor is an extraordinary parable of the corruption of the flesh and spirit. It assures Damon Galgut’s place as a major international talent. When Laurence Waters arrives at his new post at a deserted rural hospital, staff physician Frank Eloff is instantly suspicious. Laurence is everything Frank is not—young, optimistic, and full of big ideas. The whole town is beset with new arrivals and the return of old faces. Frank…
Elle: A Novel
- 2003 Governor General's winner
- 2005 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- Score: 16.53
Douglas Glover tells of a Rabelaisian riff on a dramatic historical event: the story of Marguerite de la Rocque, niece of the vicious Sieur de Roberval. Having caught her in the arms of her lover, Roberval set the lustful pair and Marguerite’s nurse ashore on the desolate Isle of Demons. Many months later, after her nurse, her lover, and her newborn baby had all died, Marguerite was rescued by a passing ship and taken home to France. Of course, the plot is only the beginning. Elle is a Grand Guignol, a Brueghel painting in words. What with real bears,…
Phantom Pain: A Novel
- 2005 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- Score: 6.55
A one-time literary novelist of some respectability, now brought low by the double insult of obscurity and crippling debt, Robert G. Mehlman is a man in need of money and recognition, fast. But Mehlman’s publisher is only interested in his long overdue novel, since the people don’t want short stories, and his portfolio was liquidated months ago. So, it is to culinary writing that he turns. A practiced decadent, a habitual spendthrift, and a serial womanizer, he has, ostensibly, all the right qualities. But the path to fame is never a smooth one.
Willenbrock: A Novel
- 2005 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- Score: 6.55
In the new unified Germany, Bernd Willenbrock is the perfect man for the season. A latecomer to the free-market feast, this former East German engineer has shown an ability to adapt to the changed environment that is downright Darwinian. The proud owner of a thriving used-car dealership and an attractive second home, he is a generous husband, pleased with his role as provider. The business practically runs itself, leaving Willenbrock free to spice up his days with extramarital adventures. Prosperity seems guaranteed by a steady stream of cash-only clients from…
Deafening: A Novel
- 2005 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- Score: 6.55
At the age of five, Grania-the daughter of hardworking Irish hoteliers in smalltown Ontario-emerges from a bout of scarlet fever profoundly deaf and is suddenly sealed off from the world that was just beginning to open for her. Her guilt-plagued mother cannot accept her daughter’s deafness. Grania’s saving grace is her grandmother Mamo, who tries to teach Grania to read and speak again. Grania’s older sister, Tress, is a beloved ally as well-obliging when Grania begs her to shout words into her ear canals and forging a rope to keep the sisters connected from…
