Annal:2005 Orange Prize for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Orange Prize in the year 2005. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
We Need to Talk About Kevin: A Novel
- 2005 Orange winner
- Score: 10.55
That neither nature nor nurture bears exclusive responsibility for a child’s character is self-evident. But such generalizations provide cold comfort when it’s your own son who’s just opened fire on his fellow students and whose class photograph—with its unseemly grin—is blown up on the national news.
The question of who’s to blame for teenage atrocity tortures our narrator, Eva Khatchadourian. Two years ago, her son, Kevin, murdered seven of his fellow high-school students, a cafeteria worker, and a popular algebra teacher. Because he was only fifteen at the…
- 2005 Orange shortlist
- Score: 6.55
“My name is Billie Morgan And I am a murderer.” Billie is in her forties, running a little jewellery shop in Bradford, watching over her godson Natty, trying to live a quiet life, trying to forget the past. Because Billie has a lot of past to forget. She was a biker chick, one of the Devil’s Own, real hardcore seventies Angels, speed and acid-fuelled road demons. She lived a life that was hurtling out of control and it ended in murder. Now, years later, she has to face the consequences.
Beautifully written, dark but never despairing, Billie Morgan is a perfect…
- 2005 Orange shortlist
- Score: 6.55
FILTH is an international lawyer with a practice in the Far East. Only the oldest Silks and QCs can remember that his nickname stands for Failed In London Try Hong Kong. But Old Filth is not as much of a Blimp as one might imagine, and his past contains many secrets and many dark hiding places…
- 2005 Orange shortlist
- Score: 6.55
An Our Town for our times, The Mammoth Cheese is beautifully crafted and driven by warm, vibrant characters as it follows the residents of rural Three Chimneys, Virginia, on their journey to re-create the original Thomas Jefferson-era, 1,235-pound “Mammoth Cheese.”
As the book opens, the town is joyously celebrating the birth of the Frank Eleven: eleven babies simultaneously born to Manda and James Frank after fertility treatments. But as autumn progresses and the babies weaken, the community seeks to redeem itself through the making and…
A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian: A Novel
- 2005 Orange shortlist
- Score: 6.55
A wise, tender, deeply funny novel about an eccentric elderly Ukrainian widower in England and the struggles of his two feuding daughters to thwart the voluptuous young gold-digger from the old country who sweeps him off his feet.
When their recently widowed father announces that he plans to remarry, sisters Vera and Nadezhda realize that they must learn to put aside a lifetime of bitter rivalry in order to save him. The new woman in his life is Valentina, a voluptuous gold-digger from Ukraine, fifty years his junior, with fabulous breasts and a proclivity for…
- 2005 Orange shortlist
- Score: 6.55
With her first novel, Liars and Saints, Meloy more than delivers on the promise of her earlier work. This richly textured, emotionally charged novel tells a story of sex and longing, love and loss, and of the deceits that can lie at the heart of family relationships.
Set in California, Liars and Saints follows four generations of the Catholic Santerre family from World War II to the present, as they navigate a succession of life-altering events—through the submerged emotion of the fifties, the recklessness and excess of the sixties and seventies,…
