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 time of the killings, he received a lenient sentence and is now in a prison for young offenders in upstate New York.
Telling the story of Kevin’s upbringing, Eva addresses herself to her estranged husband through a series of letters. Fearing that her own shortcomings may have shaped what her son has become, she confesses to a deep, long-standing ambivalence about both motherhood in general and Kevin in particular. How much is her fault?
We Need to Talk About Kevin offers no pat explanations for why so many white,…
- 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 fusion between social realism and classic noir; a powerful, passionate novel about an Inability to wipe evil from the slate of our lives. Taut like a Greek tragedy, the book is a moving, empathetic account of a woman’s heroic attempt to escape her destiny.
- 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 transporting of a symbolic Mammoth Cheese to Washington, as a gift for the newly elected President Brooke. The cheese is the brainchild of August Vaughn, a farmhand by day and a President Jefferson impersonator by night, and the creation of Margaret Prickett, a single mother and cheese maker trying to save her century-old family farm. Sheri Holman seamlessly weaves together the lives of Three Chimneys, delving into her characters’ inescapable family histories as they grapple with religion, divorce, politics, and unrequited love.
The…
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 green satin underwear and boil-in-the-bag cuisine, who will stop at nothing in her single-minded pursuit of the luxurious Western lifestyle she dreams of. But separating their addled and annoyingly lecherous dad from his new love will prove to be no easy feat—in terms of sheer cold-eyed ruthlessness, the two sisters swiftly realize that they are rank amateurs. As Hurricane Valentina turns the old family house upside down, all the old secrets come falling out, including the most deeply buried one of them all, from the war, the…
- 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, and the reckonings of the eighties and nineties. In a family driven by jealousy and propriety as much as by love, an unspoken tradition of deceit is passed from generation to generation, and fiercely protected secrets gradually drive the Santerres apart. When tragedy shatters their precarious domestic lives, it takes astonishing courage and compassion to bring them back together.
By turns funny and disturbing, irreverent and profound, Liars and Saints is a masterful display of Maile Meloy’s prodigious gifts, and of her penetrating insight—into an extraordinary American family and into the nature of human love.
