Annal:2008 Kiriyama Prize for Fiction

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Results of the Kiriyama Prize in the year 2008. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:

Mister Pip: A Novel

Lloyd Jones

On a copper-rich tropical island shattered by war, where the teachers have fled with most everyone else, only one white man chooses to stay behind: the eccentric Mr. Watts, object of much curiosity and scorn, who sweeps out the ruined schoolhouse and begins to read to the children each day from Charles Dickens’s classic Great Expectations.

So begins this rare, original story about the abiding strength that imagination, once ignited, can provide. As artillery echoes in the mountains, thirteen-year-old Matilda and her peers are riveted by the adventures of a young orphan named Pip in a city called London, a city whose contours soon become more real than their own blighted landscape. As Mr. Watts says, “A person entranced by a book simply forgets to breathe.” Soon come the rest of the villagers, initially threatened, finally inspired to share tales of their own that bring alive the rich mythology of their past. But in a ravaged place where even children are forced to live by their wits and daily survival is the only objective, imagination can be a dangerous thing.

 

The Complete Stories

David Malouf

In the heretofore unpublished Every Move You Make: bookish boys and taciturn men, strong women and wayward sons, fathers and daughters, lovers and husbands, a composer and his muse, a builder-architect and his legacy—here are their stories, whole lives brought dramatically into focus and powerfully rooted in the vividly rendered landscape of the vast Australian continent, from the mysterious, glittering Valley of Lagoons in Far North Queensland to bohemian Sydney to Ayres Rock in the Great Victoria Desert. These tender, subtle, and intimate stories give us men and women looking for something they seem to have missed, or missed out on, puzzling over not only their own lives but also the place they have come to occupy in the lives of others.

Heartbreakingly beautiful, richly satisfying, The Complete Stories also includes David Malouf’s short fiction from Dream Stuff, Antipodes, and Child’s Play. It is a major literary event.

 

I Love Dollars: and Other Stories of China

Zhu Wen, Julia Lovell

An immediate sensation upon publication in China, I Love Dollars is a hilarious send-up of China’s love affair with capitalism by one of its most gifted new writers. In the title story, a young man, acutely aware of his filial duty, sets out to secure a prostitute for his father, only to haggle his old man out of a good time. Here, gleefully exposed, are the inanities of everyday life in contemporary China. As penetrating as Kafka, as outrageously funny as Larry David, and with a slangy swagger all Zhu Wen’s own, I Love Dollars is priceless.

 

The Last Chinese Chef

Nicole Mones

The Last Chinese Chef is the transporting story of how the sensual, romantic elements of haute Chinese cuisine become the perfect ingredients to lift the troubled soul of a grieving American woman. For food writer Maggie McElroy, its been a year of trying to get her equilibrium back in the wake of her husbands premature death. Now comes a shock: a paternity claim has been filed against her husbands estate. Could he, while working in his firms Beijing office, have fathered a child? In the end, Maggie does unravel the truth about her husband. But most profoundly, The Last Chinese Chef is the exhilarating story of a woman coming home to herself in the most unexpected of places.

 

Mosquito

Roma Tearne

When Theo returns to his native Sri Lanka after his wife’s death, he hopes to escape his loss amidst the lush landscape of his increasingly war-torn country. But as he gives himself up to life in his beautiful, tortured land, he finds himself slipping into friendship with an artistic young girl, Nulani—a friendship that blossoms into love. Under the threat of civil war, as the quiet coastal town fills with whispers and suspicions, their affair offers a glimmer of hope to a country on the brink of destruction.

But all too soon, the violence that casts an ominous shadow over their love explodes. No-one, it seems, is safe; only the sea and the land remain breathtakingly lovely. As the country descends into a morass of violence and hatred, the tragedy of civil conflict spreads like a poison among friends and lovers sickened by the face of war. Ultimately, each of them will be tested in the most terrible ways…

 
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