Annal:2006 World Fantasy Award for Novel
From AwardAnnals
Results of the World Fantasy Award in the year 2006. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- World Fantasy Award for Novel
- Fantasy books
- Fantasy authors
- Speculative Fiction books
- Speculative Fiction authors.
Kafka on the Shore: A Novel
- 2006 WFA–Novel winner
- 2005 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- Score: 16.56
With Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami gives us a novel every bit as ambitious and expansive as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which has been acclaimed both here and around the world for its uncommon ambition and achievement, and whose still-growing popularity suggests that it will be read and admired for decades to come.
This magnificent new novel has a similarly extraordinary scope and the same capacity to amaze, entertain, and bewitch the reader. A tour de force of metaphysical reality, it is powered by two remarkable characters: a teenage boy, Kafka Tamura, who runs away from home either to escape a gruesome oedipal prophecy or to search for his long-missing mother and sister; and an aging simpleton called Nakata, who never recovered from a wartime affliction and now is drawn toward Kafka for reasons that, like the most basic activities of daily life, he cannot fathom. Their odyssey, as mysterious to them as it is to us, is enriched throughout by vivid accomplices and mesmerizing events. Cats and people carry on conversations, a ghostlike pimp employs a Hegel-quoting prostitute,…
- 2005 IHG–Novel winner
- 2006 WFA–Novel nominee
- Score: 16.55
Imagine becoming a best-selling novelist, and almost immediately famous and wealthy, while still in college, and before long seeing your insufferable father reduced to a bag of ashes in a safety-deposit box, while after American Psycho your celebrity drowns in a sea of vilification, booze, and drugs.
Then imagine having a second chance ten years later, as the Bret Easton Ellis of this remarkable novel is given, with a wife, children, and suburban sobriety—only to watch this new life shatter beyond recognition in a matter of days. At a fateful Halloween party he glimpses a disturbing (fictional) character driving a car identical to his late father’s, his stepdaughter’s doll violently “malfunctions,” and their house undergoes bizarre transformations both within and without. Connecting these aberrations to graver events—a series of grotesque murders that no longer seem random and the epidemic disappearance of boys his son’s age—Ellis struggles to defend his family against this escalating menace even as his wife, their therapists, and the police insist that his apprehensions…
The Limits of Enchantment: A Novel
- 2006 WFA–Novel nominee
- Score: 6.56
Everything Fern Cullen knows she’s learned from her Mammy—and none of it’s conventional. Taught midwifery at an early age, Fern grows up as Mammy’s trusted assistant in a small English village and learns through experience that secrets are precious, men can’t be trusted, hippies are filthy and people should generally mind their own business.
But when one of Mammy’s patients allegedly dies from a potion prescribed to induce abortion, the town’s people rally against her outdated methods, and Mammy ends up hospitalized, due to a bad fall and a broken heart. Now the county is threatening eviction if Fern can’t come up with the overdue rent, and a bunch of hippies and a woman with hoop earrings with a mysterious connection to Mammy seem to be the only people with any answers. As Fern struggles to save her home and Mammy’s good name, everything around her begins to transform, and she soon uncovers a legacy spotted with magic.
The Limits of Enchantment is at once a story of two women: one with a deep past and one who finds her history in the other. It is a tale of midwifery,…
Vellum: The Book of All Hours
- 2006 WFA–Novel nominee
- Score: 6.56
It’s 2017 and angels and demons walk the earth. Once they were human; now they are unkin, transformed by the ancient machine-code language of reality itself. They seek The Book of All Hours, the mythical tome within which the blueprint for all reality is transcribed, which has been lost somewhere in the Vellum-the vast realm of eternity upon which our world is a mere scratch.
The Vellum, where the unkin are gathering for war.
The Vellum, where a fallen angel and a renegade devil are about to settle an age-old feud.
The Vellum, where the past, present, and future will collide with ancient worlds and myths.
And the Vellum will burn….
- 2006 WFA–Novel nominee
- Score: 6.56
Brenden Vetch’s unique gift for connecting with the agricultural environment has brought him to the attention of the enigmatic wizard Od. Recruited as a gardener, Brenden suddenly finds himself at the wizard’s school in Kelior, where every potential mage is required by law to serve the Kingdom of Numis.
But unknown to the rulers of Numis, Brenden is far more than he seems-and his presence just may tip the balance of power back into the hands of the wizard community.
- 2006 WFA–Novel nominee
- Score: 6.56
This is a truly magical tale, full of strangeness, terrors and wonders. Many girls daydream that they are really a princess adopted by commoners. In the case of teenager Miranda Popescu, this is literally true. Because she is at the fulcrum of a deadly political battle between conjurers in an alternate world where “Roumania” is a leading European power, Miranda was hidden by her aunt in our world, where she was adopted and raised in a quiet Massachusetts college town.
The narrative is split between our world and the people in Roumania working to protect or to capture Miranda: her Aunt Aegypta Schenck versus the mad Baroness Ceaucescu in Bucharest, and the sinister alchemist, the Elector of Ratisbon, who holds her true mother prisoner in Germany. This is the story of how Miranda—with her two best friends, Peter and Andromeda—is brought back to her home reality. Each of them is changed in the process and all will have much to learn about their true identities and the strange world they find themselves in.
This story is a triumph of contemporary fantasy.
