Annal:1999 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
From AwardAnnals
Results of the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in the year 1999. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
Ingenious Pain: A Novel
- 1999 IMPAC Dublin winner
- 1997 JT Black-Fiction winner
- Score: 20.49
In 1739 James Dyer is born. He never cries, does not speak until the age of 11 and, strangest of all, cannot feel pain. When smallpox destroys his family, he joins an itinerant quack who uses him to sell bogus medicine. Then a wealthy disciple of Newton discovers James, adds him to his collection of freaks, and parades him before the scientific establishment.
With a quick and curious mind, James develops an interest in anatomy; by the age of 21, after serving under a naval doctor at sea, he has established a highly successful medical practice in Bath. A…
- 1997 Whitbread-Novel winner
- 1999 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- 1997 Booker shortlist
- Score: 22.47
Quarantine is an imaginative and powerful retelling of Christ’s fabled forty-day fast in the desert. In Jim Crace’s account, Jesus travels to a cluster of arid caves, where he crosses paths with a small group of exiles and changes their lives in unexpected ways. Evoking the strangeness and beauty of the desert landscape, Crace provocatively interprets one of our most important stories.
Underworld: A Novel
- 1999 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- 1998 Pulitzer–fiction finalist
- 1997 NBA–Fiction finalist
- 1997 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 24.49
Our lives, our half century.
Nick Shay and Klara Sax knew each other once, intimately, and they meet again in the American desert. He is trying to outdistance the crucial events of his early life, haunted by the hard logic of loss and by the echo of a gunshot in a basement room. She is an artist who has made a blood struggle for independence.
Don DeLillo’s mesmerizing novel opens with a legendary baseball game played in New York in 1951. The glorious outcome—the home run that wins the game is called the Shot Heard Round the World—shades into the grim news…
- 1999 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- 1998 PEN-faulkner finalist
- 1997 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- Score: 18.49
The ordinary seaman is Esteban, a nineteen-year-old veteran of the war in Nicaragua who has come to America with fourteen other men to form the crew of the boat Urus. Docked on a desolate Brooklyn pier, the Urus turns out to be a wreck, the men - without the ability to return to their homes—become its prisoners, and the city of New York is transformed into a mysterious and alluring world they cannot penetrate. Esteban, haunted by his dead lover from the war, eventually gathers the courage to escape from the ship and embarks on a quest for a new life and love in…
Enduring Love: A Novel
- 1999 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- 1997 JT Black-Fiction shortlist
- 1997 Whitbread-Novel shortlist
- Score: 18.49
Science writer Joe Rose is spending a day in the country with his long-time lover, Clarissa, when he witnesses a tragic accident—a balloon with a boy trapped in it is being tossed by the wind, and, in an attempt to save the child, a man is killed. As though that isn’t disturbing enough, a man named Jed Parry, who has joined Rose in helping to bring the balloon to safety, believes that something has passed between him and Rose—something that sparks in Parry a deranged, obsessive kind of love.
Soon Parry is stalking Rose, who turns to science to try to…
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel
- 1999 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- Score: 6.49
In a Tokyo suburb a young man named Toru Okada searches for his wife’s missing cat. Soon he finds himself looking for his wife as well in a netherworld that lies beneath the placid surface of Tokyo. As these searches intersect, Okada encounters a bizarre group of allies and antagonists: a psychic prostitute; a malevolent yet mediagenic politician; a cheerfully morbid sixteen-year-old-girl; and an aging war veteran who has been permanently changed by the hideous things he witnessed during Japan’s forgotten campaign in Manchuria.
Gripping, prophetic, suffused…
The Reader: A Novel
Bernhard Schlink, Carol Brown Janeway
- 1999 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- 1997 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- Score: 12.49
Hailed for its coiled eroticism and the moral claims it makes upon the reader, this mesmerizing novel is a story of love and secrets, horror and compassion, unfolding against the haunted landscape of postwar Germany.
When he falls ill on his way home from school, fifteen-year-old Michael Berg is rescued by Hanna, a woman twice his age. In time she becomes his lover—then she inexplicably disappears. When Michael next sees her, he is a young law student, and she is on trial for a hideous crime. As he watches her refuse to defend her innocence, Michael gradually realizes that Hanna may be guarding a secret she considers more shameful than murder.
The Puttermesser Papers: A Novel
- 1999 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- 1997 NBA–Fiction finalist
- Score: 12.49
With dashing originality and in prose that sings like an entire choir of sirens, Cynthia Ozick relates the life and times of her most compelling fictional creation. Ruth Puttermesser lives in New York City. Her learning is monumental. Her love life is minimal (she prefers pouring through Plato to romping with married Morris Rappoport). And her fantasies have a disconcerting tendency to come true—with disastrous consequences for what we laughably call “reality.”
Puttermesser yearns for a daughter and promptly creates one, unassisted, in the form of the first…
