Annal:2000 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in the year 2000. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
White Teeth: A Novel
- 2000 JT Black-Fiction winner
- 2000 Whitbread-1st Novel winner
- 2000 LATimes–1st Fiction finalist
- 2000 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- 2000 Orange shortlist
- Score: 38.5
On New Year’s morning, 1975, Archie Jones sits in his car on a London road and waits for the exhaust fumes to fill his Cavalier Musketeer station wagon. Archie—working-class, ordinary, a failed marriage under his belt—is calling it quits, the deciding factor being the flip of a 20-pence coin. When the owner of a nearby halal butcher shop (annoyed that Archie’s car is blocking his delivery area) comes out and bangs on the window, he gives Archie another chance at life and sets in motion this richly imagined, uproariously funny novel.
Epic and intimate,…
The Hiding Place: A Novel
- 2000 Booker shortlist
- 2000 JT Black-Fiction shortlist
- Score: 12.5
This exceptional debut novel about family, love, and the innocence and terror of childhood has caused an absolute sensation, garnering no less than eleven leading publishers around the world. Set in a Maltese immigrant community in Cardiff, Wales, and peopled with sharp-edged, luminously drawn characters, The Hiding Place is the story of Frankie Gauci, his wife Mary, and their six daughters and about Frankie’s betrayal, gambling away his family’s livelihood and eventually the family itself. Written in magical language buoyed by grace, it is a mesmerizing…
House of Leaves: A Novel
- 2000 IHG–1st Novel nominee
- 2000 JT Black-Fiction shortlist
- 2000 Stoker–1st Novel nominee
- Score: 18.5
Years ago, when House of Leaves was first being passed around, it was nothing more than a badly bundled heap of paper, parts of which would occasionally surface on the Internet. No one could have anticipated the small but devoted following this terrifying story would soon command. Starting with an odd assortment of marginalized youth—musicians, tattoo artists, programmers, strippers, environmentalists, and adrenaline junkies—the book eventually made its way into the hands of older generations, who not only found themselves in those strangely arranged pages…
- 2000 JT Black-Fiction shortlist
- Score: 6.5
The story begins in the ancient Greece of myth, where King Meleager of Kalydon has assembled the sixty greatest hunters—and one huntress, Atalanta—to rid his realm of the supernatural boar sent by the vengeful goddess Artemis to lay waste to his lands. But as the hunters bear down upon their prey a darker tale unfolds, of treachery and destructive love. It is a tale that will reverberate in those same hills across the millennia in the final chaotic months of the Second World War, as a band of Greek partisans pursues an S.S. officer.
Solomon Memel, a young…
