Annal:2006 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the year 2006. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 2006 LATimes–1st Fiction winner
- Score: 10.56
Summer 1967. The turmoil of the Maoist revolution is spilling over into Hong Kong and causing unrest as war rages in neighboring Vietnam.
White Ghost Girls is the story of Frankie and Kate, two American sisters living in a foreign land in a chaotic time. With their war-photographer father off in Vietnam, Marianne, their beautiful but remote mother, keeps the family close by. Although bound by a closeness of living overseas, the sisters could not be more different—Frankie pulses with curiosity and risk, while Kate is all eyes and ears. Marianne spends her days painting watercolors of the lush surroundings, leaving the girls largely unsupervised, while their Chinese nanny, Ah Bing, does her best to look after them. One day in a village market, they decide to explore—with tragic results.
In Alice Greenway’s exquisite gem of a novel, two girls tumble into their teenage years against an extraordinary backdrop both sensuous and dangerous. This astonishing literary debut is a tale of sacrifice and solidarity that gleams with the kind of intense, complicated love that only exists between sisters.
Golden Country: A Novel
- 2006 LATimes–1st Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.56
Spanning the first half of the twentieth century, Golden Country vividly brings to life the intertwining stories of three immigrants seeking their fortunes—the handsome and ambitious Seymour, a salesman-turned-gangster-turned-Broadway-producer; the gentle and pragmatic Joseph, a door-to-door salesman who is driven to invent a cleanser effective enough to wipe away the shame of his brother’s mob connections; and the irresistible Frances Gold, who grows up in Brooklyn, stars in Seymour’s first show, and marries the man who invents television. Their three families, though inextricably connected for years, are brought together for the first time by the engagement of Seymour’s son and Joseph’s daughter. David and Miriam’s marriage must endure the inheritance of not only their parents' wealth but also the burdens of their past.
Epic and comic, poignant and wise, Golden Country introduces readers to an extraordinary new voice in fiction.
Mary: A Novel
- 2006 LATimes–1st Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.56
An engrossing novel about Mary Todd Lincoln—one of history’s most misunderstood and enigmatic women.
Writing from Bellevue asylum—where the shrieks of the other inmates keep her awake at night—a famous widow can finally share the story of her life in her own words. From her tempestuous childhood in a slaveholding Southern family through the opium-clouded years after her husband’s death, we are let into the inner, intimate world of this brave and fascinating woman.
Intelligent, unconventional–and, some thought, mad–she held spiritualist séances in the White House, ran her family into debt with compulsive shopping, negotiated with conniving politicians, and raised her young sons in the nation’s capital during the bloodiest war this country has ever known. She was also a political strategist, a comfort to wounded soldiers, a supporter of emancipation, the first to be called First Lady, and a wife and mother who survived the loss of three children and the assassination of her beloved husband.
Interwoven with her memories of the past, she describes life in the asylum,…
Skinner's Drift: A Novel
- 2006 LATimes–1st Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.56
Ten years after leaving South Africa, Eva van Rensburg returns to her dying father, a violent stuttering man whose terrible secret Eva has kept since she was a child, and to Skinner’s Drift, the family farm, a tough stretch of land on the Limpopo River where jackals and leopards still roam.
In this beautiful first novel, Lisa Fugard paints a haunting portrait of a family careening toward disaster. She vividly describes the isolation of Eva’s rebellious and lonely English mother; the desperation of her Afrikaner father as drought destroys his farm; the conflicts among the black farmworkers as the younger generation questions the loyalty and subservience of their elders; and the dangerous silence of a young girl who witnesses too much.
Like Nadine Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee, Fugard has written a profoundly moving family drama, subtly set against the backdrop of a country in turmoil. She moves with extraordinary agility between intimate and revelatory domestic scenes and the fiercely challenging land. This is a powerful story from a stunning new writer.
Whiteman: A Novel
- 2006 LATimes–1st Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.56
Whiteman is an extraordinary debut novel about a maverick American relief worker deep in the West African bush. When his funding is cut off, Jack Diaz refuses to leave his post, a Muslim village in the Ivory Coast where Christians and Muslims are squaring off for war. Against a backdrop of bloody conflict and vibrant African life, Jack and his village guardian, Mamadou, learn that hate knows no color and that true heroism waits for us where we least expect it.
During lulls in the violence, Jack learns the cycles of Africa—of hunting in the rain forest, cultivating the yam, and navigating the nuances of the language; of witchcraft, storytelling, and chivalry. Despite the omnipresence of AIDS, he courts Djamilla, the stunning Peul girl; meets Mariam, his neighbor's wife, in the darkened forest when the moon is new; and desperately pursues Mazatou, the village flirt. Still, Jack spends many a night alone in his hut, longing for love in a place where his skin color excludes him.
Brimming with dangerous passions, ubiquitous genies, spirited proverbs, and the pressures of life in a time of war, Whiteman is a tale of desire, isolation, humor, action, and fear.
