Annal:2006 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in the year 2006. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 2007 Pulitzer–fiction winner
- 2006 JT Black-Fiction winner
- 2006 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 26.57
A searing, postapocalyptic novel destined to become Cormac McCarthy’s masterpiece.
A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. They sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don’t know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food—and each other.
The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, “each the other’s world entire,” are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.
- 2006 JT Black-Fiction shortlist
- Score: 6.56
Ray Robinson’s visceral, ambitious debut novel Electricity is a tour de force portrayal of a heroine you will not soon forget. Thirty-year-old Lily O’Connor lives with epilepsy, uncontrollable surges of electricity that leave her in a constant state of edginess. Prickly, up-front-honest and down-to-earth practical, Lily has learned to make do, to make the most of things, to look after—and out for—herself. Then her mother—whom Lily has not seen for years—dies, and Lily is drawn back into a world she thought she’d long since left behind. Reunited with her brother, a charismatic poker player, Lily pursues her own high-stakes gamble, leaving for London to track down her other, missing brother Mikey. In the pandemonium of the city, Lily’s seizures only intensify. As her journey takes her from her comfort zone, it leads her into the question of what her life is meant to be.
Half of a Yellow Sun: A Novel
- 2007 Orange winner
- 2006 JT Black-Fiction shortlist
- 2006 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 22.57
A masterly, haunting new novel from a writer heralded by The Washington Post Book World as “the 21st-century daughter of Chinua Achebe,” Half of a Yellow Sun re-creates a seminal moment in modern African history: Biafra’s impassioned struggle to establish an independent republic in Nigeria in the 1960s, and the chilling violence that followed.
With astonishing empathy and the effortless grace of a natural storyteller, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie weaves together the lives of three characters swept up in the turbulence of the decade. Thirteen-year-old Ugwu is employed as a houseboy for a university professor full of revolutionary zeal. Olanna is the professor’s beautiful mistress, who has abandoned her life of privilege in Lagos for a dusty university town and the charisma of her new lover. And Richard is a shy young Englishman in thrall to Olanna’s twin sister, an enigmatic figure who refuses to belong to anyone. As Nigerian troops advance and the three must run for their lives, their ideals are severely tested, as are their loyalties to one another.
Epic,…
- 2006 Booker shortlist
- 2006 JT Black-Fiction shortlist
- 2006 Orange shortlist
- Score: 18.56
Moving back through the 1940s, through air raids, blacked-out streets, illicit liasons, and sexual adventure, to end with its beginning in 1941, The Night Watch tells the story of Londoners: three women and a young man with a past-whose lives, and those of their friends and lovers, connect in ways that are surprising not always known to them. In wartime London, the women work-as ambulance drivers, ministry clerks, and building inspectors. There are feats of heroism, epic and quotidian, and tragedies both enormous and personal, but the emotional interiors of her characters that Waters captures with absolute and intimacy.
Waters describes with perfect knowingness the taut composure of a rescue worker in the aftermath of a bombing, the idle longing of a young woman her soldier lover, the peculiar thrill convict watching the sky ignite through the bars on his window, the hunger a woman stalking the streets for encounter, and the panic of another who sees her love affair coming end. At the same time, Waters is absolute control of a narrative that offers up subtle surprises and exquisite…
Seven Lies: A Novel
- 2006 JT Black-Fiction shortlist
- Score: 6.56
Part political thriller, part meditation on the nature of desire and betrayal, Seven Lies tells the story of Stefan Vogel, a young East German, whose yearnings for love, glory, and freedom express themselves in a lifelong fantasy of going to America. By a series of increasingly dangerous maneuvers, he makes this fantasy come true, his past seemingly locked behind the Berlin Wall and a new life of unbounded bliss ahead of him. But then his world begins to fall apart.
The View from Castle Rock: Stories
- 2006 JT Black-Fiction shortlist
- Score: 6.56
A powerful new collection from one of our most beloved, admired, and honored writers.
In stories that are more personal than any that she’s written before, Alice Munro pieces her family’s history into gloriously imagined fiction. A young boy is taken to Edinburgh’s Castle Rock, where his father assures him that on a clear day he can see America, and he catches a glimpse of his father’s dream. In stories that follow, as the dream becomes a reality, two sisters-in-law experience very different kinds of passion on the long voyage to the New World; a baby is lost and magically reappears on a journey from an Illinois homestead to the Canadian border.
Other stories take place in more familiar Munro territory, the towns and countryside around Lake Huron, where the past shows through the present like the traces of a glacier on the landscape and strong emotions stir just beneath the surface of ordinary comings and goings. First love flowers under the apple tree, while a stronger emotion presents itself in the barn. A girl hired as summer help, and uneasy about her “place” in the…
