Annal:2000 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
From AwardAnnals
Results of the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in the year 2000. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 2000 IMPAC Dublin winner
- Score: 10.5
During his commute to a job spraying weed killer outside of London, Ronny passes a man standing on a bridge, waving at the cars—every day, no matter what the time or the weather. One day, when Ronny drives by, the man is hanging over the bridge, as if he might jump. Instinctively, Ronny pulls over and begins talking to the stranger. Ronny discovers the man is also named Ronny, wears his kind of white shoes, and knows his older brother Nathan.
The rest of Wide Open’s characters are as intriguingly peculiar as the two Ronnies. Nathan, the son of a…
The Hours: A Novel
- 1999 PEN-faulkner winner
- 1999 Pulitzer–fiction winner
- 2000 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- 1998 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 32.49
A daring, deeply affecting third novel by the author of A Home at the End of the World and Flesh and Blood.
In The Hours, Michael Cunningham, widely praised as one of the most gifted writers of his generation, draws inventively on the life and work of Virginia Woolf to tell the story of a group of contemporary characters struggling with the conflicting claims of love and inheritance, hope and despair. The narrative of Woolf’s last days before her suicide early in World War II counterpoints the fictional stories of Samuel, a famous poet whose…
Trumpet: A Novel
- 2000 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- Score: 6.5
Jackie Kay’s mesmerizing and powerfully moving first novel is about the extraordinary life and seeming dissolution of a family—about the boundaries of identity and the essential nature of love.
At its center is Joss Moody, a celebrated jazz trumpeter who created music that convinced everyone who heard it that they knew the man who made it. But Joss’s death has proved them all wrong: Joss Moody lived his life inside a stunning secret. His wife, Millie, had known about it. But their adopted son, Colman, now in his thirties, has just learned of it. With…
This Side of Brightness: A Novel
- 2000 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- Score: 6.5
In the early years of the century, Nathan Walker leaves the Okefenokee swamps of his native Georgia for New York City and the most dangerous job in America. A sandhog, he burrows beneath the East River, digging the underground tunnel that will carry trains between Brooklyn and Manhattan. In the bowels of the riverbed the sandhogs—black, white, Irish, Italian—dig together; above ground, though, the men keep their distance until a spectacular accident welds a bond between Walker and his fellow sandhogs that will bless and curse the next three generations.
Years…
Charming Billy: A Novel
- 1998 NBA–Fiction winner
- 2000 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- Score: 16.48
Billy Lynch’s family and friends have gathered at a small Bronx bar. They have come to comfort his widow and to eulogize one of the last great romantics, trading tales of his famous humor, immense charm, and unfathomable sorrow. As they linger on into this extraordinary night, their voices form Billy’s tragic story and their mourning becomes a gentle homage to all the lives in their small community fractured by grief, shattered by secrets, and sustained by the simple dream of love.
- 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…
- 2000 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- 1998 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- Score: 12.5
I Married a Communist is the story of the rise and fall of Ira Ringold, a big American roughneck who begins life as a teenage ditch-digger in 1930s Newark, becomes a big-time 1940s radio star, and is destroyed, as both a performer and a man, in the McCarthy witchhunt of the 1950s.
In his heyday as a star—and as a zealous, bullying supporter of “progressive” political causes—Ira marries Hollywood’s beloved silent-film star, Eve Frame. Their glamorous honeymoon in her Manhattan townhouse is shortlived, however, and it is the publication of Eve’s…
