Annal:2005 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First 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:
Beasts of No Nation: A Novel
- 2005 LATimes–1st Fiction winner
- 2005 JT Black-Fiction shortlist
- Score: 16.55
In this stunning debut novel, Agu, a young boy in an unnamed West African nation, is recruited into a unit of guerrilla fighters as civil war engulfs his country. Haunted by his father’s own death at the hands of militants, which he fled just before witnessing, Agu is vulnerable to the dangerous yet paternal nature of his new commander.
While the war rages on, Agu becomes increasingly divorced from the life he had known before the conflict started—a life of school friends, church services, and time with his family still intact. As he vividly recalls these…
A Sudden Country: A Novel
- 2006 PEN-faulkner finalist
- 2005 LATimes–1st Fiction finalist
- Score: 12.56
A vivid and revelatory novel based on actual events of the 1847 Oregon migration, A Sudden Country follows two characters of remarkable complexity and strength in a journey of survival and redemption.
James MacLaren, once a resourceful and ambitious Hudson’s Bay Company trader, has renounced his aspirations for a quiet family life in the Bitterroot wilderness. Yet his life is overturned in the winter of 1846, when his Nez Perce wife deserts him and his children die of smallpox. In the grip of a profound sorrow, MacLaren, whose home once spanned a…
Garner: A Novel
- 2005 LATimes–1st Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.55
Landlocked, sail-shaped Garner, New Hampshire, is a town delineated by its Puritan ethics and its “Live Free or Die” mentality. Like the forbidding landscape of Wharton’s Ethan Frome, this New England outpost keeps its secrets and shapes its inhabitants. Frances Giddens, a spirited, elusive girl born at the dawn of the twentieth century and now approaching womanhood, moves through the forests and rivers that mark Garner’s borders as easily as she befriends its stoic residents.
In the summer of 1925, with Garner’s economic prospects in decline, a group…
The Dream Life of Sukhanov: A Novel
- 2005 LATimes–1st Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.55
A brilliantly crafted novel about one man’s betrayal of his talent, his friends, and his principles-a work of demon energy, startling imagery, and utter originality.
At fifty-six, Anatoly Sukhanov has everything a man could want. Nearly twenty-five years ago, he traded his precarious existence as a brilliant underground artist for the perks and comforts of a high-ranking Soviet apparatchik. Once he created art; now he censors it. His past is a shadow, repressed to the point of nonexistence. But a series of increasingly bizarre events transforms his perfect…
- 2005 LATimes–1st Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.55
This stunning debut novel tells the story of a biblical struggle in a remote Jamaican village in 1957. With language as taut as classic works by Cormac McCarthy, and a richness reminiscent of early Toni Morrison, Marlon James reveals his unique narrative command that will firmly establish his place as one of today’s freshest, most talented young writers.
In the village of Gibbeah—where certain women fly and certain men protect secrets with their lives—magic coexists with religion, and good and evil are never as they seem. In this town, a battle is fought…
