Annal:2005 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the year 2005. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
Memories of My Melancholy Whores: A Novel
Gabriel García Márquez, Edith Grossman
- 2005 LATimes–Fiction winner
- Score: 10.55
On the eve of his ninetieth birthday, our unnamed protagonist—an undistinguished journalist and lifelong bachelor—decides to give himself “the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin.”
The virgin, whom an old madam procures for him, is splendidly young, with the silent power of a sleeping beauty. The night of love blossoms into a transforming year. It is a year in which he relives, in a rush of memories, his lifetime of (paid-for) sexual adventures and experiences a revelation that brings him to the edge of dying—not of old age, but, at long…
The March: A Novel
- 2006 PEN-faulkner winner
- 2005 NBCC–Fiction winner
- 2006 Pulitzer–fiction finalist
- 2005 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- 2005 NBA–Fiction finalist
- Score: 38.56
In 1864, after Union general William Tecumseh Sherman burned Atlanta, he marched his sixty thousand troops east through Georgia to the sea, and then up into the Carolinas. The army fought off Confederate forces and lived off the land, pillaging the Southern plantations, taking cattle and crops for their own, demolishing cities, and accumulating a borne-along population of freed blacks and white refugees until all that remained was the dangerous transient life of the uprooted, the dispossessed, and the triumphant. Only a master novelist could so powerfully and…
Veronica: A Novel
- 2005 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- 2005 NBA–Fiction finalist
- 2005 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 18.55
As a teenager on the streets of San Francisco, Alison is discovered by a photographer and swept into the world of fashion-modeling in Paris and Rome. When her career crashes and a love affair ends disastrously, she moves to New York City to build a new life. There she meets Veronica—an older wisecracking eccentric with her own ideas about style, a proofreader who comes to work with a personal “office kit” and a plaque that reads “Still Anal After All These Years.” Improbably, the two women become friends. Their friendship will survive not only Alison’s reentry…
A Long Way Down: A Novel
- 2005 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- 2005 Whitbread-Novel shortlist
- Score: 12.55
New Year’s Eve at Toppers’ House, North London’s most popular suicide spot. And four strangers are about to discover that doing away with yourself isn’t quite the private act they’d each expected.
Perma-tanned Martin Sharp’s a disgraced breakfast TV presenter who had it all—the kids, the wife, the pad, the great career—and wasted it away. Killing himself is Martin’s logical and appropriate response to an unliveable life.
Maureen has to do it tonight, because of Matty being in the home. He was never able to do any of the normal things kids do—like walk or…
Kafka on the Shore: A Novel
- 2006 WFA–Novel winner
- 2005 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- Score: 16.56
With Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami gives us a novel every bit as ambitious and expansive as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which has been acclaimed both here and around the world for its uncommon ambition and achievement, and whose still-growing popularity suggests that it will be read and admired for decades to come.
This magnificent new novel has a similarly extraordinary scope and the same capacity to amaze, entertain, and bewitch the reader. A tour de force of metaphysical reality, it is powered by two remarkable characters: a teenage…
