Annal:2000 Orange Prize for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Orange Prize in the year 2000. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 2000 Orange winner
- Score: 10.5
When I Lived in Modern Times is one woman’s story of discovery-of herself, of her heritage, and of the nation that would one day become Israel.
It is April 1946. For a weary and exhausted Europe, it’s a time to begin picking up the pieces of the past, and for the armies of displaced persons on the move to slowly return home-if they still have one. But for Evelyn Sert, a twenty-year-old woman from London standing on the deck of a ship bound for Palestine, it is a time of adventure and a time of change when anything seems possible.
Landing on the…
- 2000 Orange shortlist
- Score: 6.5
In her sparkling, startling novel about mothers, daughters, and love, Judy Budnitz gives the traditional folktale an electrifying twist as she follows four generations of women from an Eastern European village to the tenements of an American city.
Ilana, eager to escape her formidable mother’s all consuming love, embarks on an epic journey to the New World, met along the way by evil, magic, and good fortune. The daughter, granddaughter, and great-granddaughter who follow in her footsteps share her special powers of observation and, often, destruction. The…
- 2000 Orange shortlist
- Score: 6.5
It is 1972: a group of teenagers, some from Dublin, some from Derry, are spending a month in the Irish-speaking district of Donegal, learning Irish language and culture from their teachers and from the local people they are boarding with. Urban dwellers, released for the first time from the reins of parental control, they respond to the untamed landscape of river, hill, and seas, finding in it unnerving echoes of their own submerged—and now emerging—wildness.
In this richly complex new novel. Ni Dhuibhne, one of Ireland’s most exciting and original writers,…
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,…
- 1999 LATimes–1st Fiction winner
- 2000 Orange shortlist
- 2000 PEN-faulkner finalist
- Score: 22.49
With compassion, humor, and striking insight, Amy and Isabelle explores the secrets of sexuality that jeopardize the lovebetween a mother and her daughter. Amy Goodrow, a shy high school student in a small mill town, falls in love with her math teacher, and together they cross the line between understandable fantasy and disturbing reality. When discovered, this emotional and physical trespass brings disgrace to Amy’s mother, Isabelle, and intensifies the shame she feels about her own past. In a fury, she lashes out at her daughter’s beauty and then retreats into…
Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood: A Novel
- 2000 Orange shortlist
- Score: 6.5
When Vivi and Siddalee Walker, an unforgettable mother-daughter team, get into a savage fight over a New York Times article that refers to Vivi as a “tap-dancing child abuser,” the fallout is felt from Louisiana to New York to Seattle. Siddalee, a successful theater director with a huge hit on her hands, panics and postpones her upcoming wedding to her lover and friend, Connor McGill. Vivi’s intrepid gang of lifelong girlfriends, the Ya-Yas, sashay in and conspire to bring everyone back together.
In 1932, Vivi and the Ya-Yas were disqualified from a…
