Annal:2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Pulitzer Prize in the year 2005. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
Gilead: A Novel
- 2005 Pulitzer–fiction winner
- 2004 NBCC–Fiction winner
- 2005 PEN-faulkner finalist
- 2004 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- Score: 32.55
In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames’s life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Ames is the son of an Iowan preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young man in Maine, saw a vision of Christ bound in chains and came west to Kansas to fight for abolition: He “preached men into the Civil War,” then, at age fifty, became a chaplain in the Union Army, losing his right eye in battle. Reverend Ames writes to his son about the tension between his father—an ardent pacifist—and his grandfather, whose pistol and…
War Trash: A novel
- 2005 PEN-faulkner winner
- 2005 Kiriyama-Fiction finalist
- 2005 Pulitzer–fiction finalist
- Score: 22.55
War Trash, the extraordinary new novel by the National Book Award–winning author of Waiting, is Ha Jin’s most ambitious work to date: a powerful, unflinching story that opens a window on an unknown aspect of a little-known war—the experiences of Chinese POWs held by Americans during the Korean conflict—and paints an intimate portrait of conformity and dissent against a sweeping canvas of confrontation.
Set in 1951–53, War Trash takes the form of the memoir of Yu Yuan, a young Chinese army officer, one of a corps of “volunteers” sent by Mao…
An Unfinished Season: A Novel
- 2005 Pulitzer–fiction finalist
- Score: 6.55
“The winter of the year my father carried a gun for his own protection was the coldest on record in Chicago.” So begins Ward Just’s An Unfinished Season, the winter in question a postwar moment of the 1950s when the modern world lay just over the horizon, a time of rabid anticommunism, worker unrest, and government corruption. Even the small-town family could not escape the nationwide suspicion and dread of “the enemy within.”
In rural Quarterday, on the margins of Chicago’s North Shore, nineteen-year-old Wilson Ravan watches as his father’s life…
