Annal:2007 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the year 2007. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears: A Novel
- 2007 LATimes–1st Fiction winner
- Score: 10.57
Seventeen years ago, Sepha Stephanos fled the Ethiopian Revolution after witnessing soldiers beat his father to the point of certain death, selling off his parents’ jewelry to pay for passage to the United States. Now he finds himself running a grocery store in a poor African-American neighborhood in Washington, D.C. His only companions are two fellow African immigrants who share his feelings of frustration with and bitter nostalgia for their home continent. He realizes that his life has turned out completely different and far more isolated from the one he had imagined for himself years ago.
Soon Sepha’s neighborhood begins to change. Hope comes in the form of new neighbors-Judith and Naomi, a white woman and her biracial daughter-who become his friends and remind him of what having a family is like for the first time in years. But when the neighborhood’s newfound calm is disturbed by a series of racial incidents, Sepha may lose everything all over again.
Told in a haunting and powerful first-person narration that casts the streets of Washington, D.C., and Addis Ababa through…
The Last Chicken in America: A Novel
- 2007 LATimes–1st Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.57
Twelve linked, wryly humorous stories about an unforgettable cast of Russian-Jewish immigrants trying to assimilate in a new world.
Masha is just out of high school when her family arrives in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh. With touching lightheartedness and tremendous humor, these stories trace her struggles and those of other Russians in the community to find their own place in the new societyseniors alienated from their children, spouses trying to hold their families together while grappling with unemployment and depression, young adults searching for love. In “Dancers” a pair of hedonistic and financially unstable performers invades the home of a married couple. The hero of “The Trajectory of Frying Pans” falls for a coworker who may or may not be trapped in a green-card marriage. In “About Kamyshinskiy” a man, living under the scrutiny of his daughters and neighbors, is trying to start over after the death of his wife. This is an impressive debut about the sometimes painful, sometimes hilarious collision of cultures, religions, and generations in contemporary America.
Skylark Farm: A Novel
Antonia Arslan, Geoffrey Brock
- 2007 LATimes–1st Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.57
A beautiful, wrenching debut novel chronicling the life of a family struggling for survival during the Armenian genocide in Turkey, in 1915.
At the center: Yerwant, who, at thirteen, left his home in the Anatolian hills of Turkey to study at an Armenian boarding school in Venice. Now, in May 1915, after forty years, he is planning a long-awaited reunion with his family at their homestead, Skylark Farm. But while joyful preparations for Yerwant’s arrival are being made in the town of his birth, Italy enters the Great War and closes its borders. At the same time, in Turkey, Yerwant’s family begins a brutal odyssey of forced marches and prison camps, hunger and humiliation at the hands of the Young Turks who are determined to rid their nation of minorities. In the unfolding story we follow Yerwant’s family as it struggles to survive and as four of its children set out on a dangerous and daring course of their own: to reach Yerwant, and safety, in Italy.
Antonia Arslan draws on the story of her own family to tell the story of Skylark Farm. She has transformed the “obscure memories” that are her heritage into a novel as lyrical and poignant as a fable.
Twenty Grand: And Other Tales of Love and Money
- 2007 LATimes–1st Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.57
In this dazzling literary debut, Rebecca Curtis displays the gifts that make her one of the most talented writers of her generation. Her characters—young women struggling to find happiness, love, success, security, and adventure—wait tables, run away from home, fall for married men, betray their friends, and find themselves betrayed as well.
In “Hungry Self,” a young waitress descends into the basement of a seemingly ordinary Chinese restaurant; in “Twenty Grand,” a young wife tries to recover her lost fortune; in “Monsters,” one family’s paranoia leads to a sacrifice; and in “The Witches,” an innocent swim on prom night proves more dangerous than anyone could have imagined. With elegant prose and a wicked sense of humor, these stories reveal Curtis’s provocative and uncompromising view of life, one that makes her writing so poignant and irresistible.
- 2007 LATimes–1st Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.57
Set in New York City and in a Buddhist monastery in rural Vermont, The Understory is both a mystery and a psychological study and reveals that repression and self-expression can be equally destructive.
The perennially unemployed Jack Gorse is the center of this gripping novel. Entrapped by his obsessive-compulsive routines, he immerses himself in secondhand books and in his study of Central Park plant life, his two bulwarks against a world he finds overwhelming. An attraction to another man, a near stranger, takes Jack by surprise, destabilizes his precarious balance, and culminates in violence. The Understory will resonate with readers long after its dramatic conclusion.
