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. Frankie and Kate are two American sisters living in a foreign land in a chaotic time. With their war-photographer father off in Vietnam, their beautiful but remote mother keeps the family close by. 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, gangster, 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 are brought together for the first time by the engagement of Seymour’s son and Joseph’s daughter, who must endure the inheritance of wealth and the burdens of their past.
Mary: A Novel
- 2006 LATimes–1st Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.56
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. A dramatic tale filled with passion and depression, poverty and ridicule, infidelity and redemption, this is the unforgettable story of Mary Todd Lincoln.
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, brave, and extraordinarily moving first novel, Lisa Fugard paints a haunting portrait of a young woman coming to terms with her family’s violent past as her homeland, South Africa, confronts its own bloody history. Fugard moves with extraordinary agility between intimate and revelatory domestic scenes and the fiercely challenging land, “like the ravaged hide of some ancient beast.” 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.
