Annal:1999 Orange Prize for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Orange Prize in the year 1999. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 1999 Orange winner
- 1998 Edgar-1st Novel nominee
- 1997 LATimes–1st Fiction finalist
- Score: 22.49
An auspicious debut novel by a young writer who will remind readers of Anne Lamott and Anne Tyler
Crime in the Neighborhood centers on a headline event— the molestation and murder of a twelve-year-old boy in a Washington, D.C., suburb. At the time of the murder, 1973, Marsha was nine years old and as an adult she still remembers that summer as a time when murder and her own family’s upheaval were intertwined. Everyone, it seemed to Marsha at the time, was committing crimes. Her father deserted his family to take up with her mother’s younger sister. Her…
The Short History of a Prince: A Novel
- 1999 Orange shortlist
- Score: 6.49
Set in Jane Hamilton’s signature Midwest, The Short History of a Prince is the story of Walter McCloud and his ambition to become a great ballet dancer. With compassion and humor, and alternating between Walter’s adolescent and adult voices, the novel tells of Walter’s heartbreak as he realizes that his passion cannot make up for the innate talent that he lacks.
Introduced as a child to the genius of Balanchine and the lyricism of Tchaikovsky by his stern but cultured aunt Sue Rawson, Walter has dreamed of growing up to shine in the role of the Prince…
- 1999 Orange shortlist
- 1999 PEN-faulkner finalist
- 1999 Pulitzer–fiction finalist
- Score: 18.49
The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it—from garden seeds to Scripture—is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family’s tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa.
The novel is set against one of the most dramatic…
- 2000 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- 1999 Orange shortlist
- Score: 12.5
“Rumors had been whispered for more than a year. Outrages that had been accumulating all along took shape as evidence. A mother was knocked down the stairs by her cold-eyed daughter. Four damaged infants were born in one family. Daughters refused to get out of bed. Brides disappeared on their honeymoons. Two brothers shot each other on New Year’s Day. Trips to Demby for VD shots common. And what went on at the Oven these days was not to be believed…The proof they had been collecting since the terrible discovery in the spring could not be denied: the one thing…
The Leper's Companions: A novel
- 1999 JT Black-Fiction shortlist
- 1999 Orange shortlist
- Score: 12.49
The Leper’s Companions begins, we know only that the narrator has lost someone she loves. In her bereavement, she creates a past in which she might both lose and find herself: a fifteenth-century village in a land of saints and spirits, inexplicable afflictions and miraculous awakenings. With a band of pilgrims—among them an old man, his pregnant daughter, a priest, a dying woman, and a leper—she discovers a beached mermaid, watches a priest drive madness from a woman’s mouth, enters a mossy forest inhabited by a hunted man covered in shaggy hair, and…
Visible Worlds: A Novel
- 1999 Orange shortlist
- Score: 6.49
In Visible Worlds, award-winning Canadian poet and playwright Marilyn Bowering has created a beguiling, multilayered fiction that brings together two seemingly disparate stories as it races the shattering personal consequences of war. Spanning the middle part of our century, with World War II and the Korean War as its fulcrum, the novel expertly distills an epic story into a finely limned, elegant narrative of understated proportions.
Set in Canada, Germany, Korea, and the Soviet Union, Visible Worlds begins in 1960, with the death of Nate Bone…
