Annal:2002 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the year 2002. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
Atonement: A Novel
- 2002 LATimes–Fiction winner
- 2002 NBCC–Fiction winner
- 2001 Booker shortlist
- 2001 JT Black-Fiction shortlist
- 2001 Whitbread-Novel shortlist
- Score: 38.52
On the hottest day of the summer of 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her older sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching Cecilia is their housekeeper’s son Robbie Turner, a childhood friend who, along with Briony’s sister, has recently graduated from Cambridge.
By the end of that day the lives of all three will have been changed forever. Robbie and Cecilia will have crossed a boundary they had never before dared to approach and will have become victims of the younger girl’s scheming imagination. And Briony will have committed a dreadful crime, the guilt for which will color her entire life.
Atonement is Ian McEwan’s finest achievement. Brilliant and utterly enthralling in its depiction of childhood, love and war, England and class, the novel is at its center a profound–and profoundly moving–exploration of shame and forgiveness and the difficulty of absolution.
The City of Your Final Destination
- 2003 PEN-faulkner finalist
- 2002 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- Score: 12.53
A wryly humorous, impeccably observed novel about the capriciousness of love
Omar Razaghi posts a letter on September 13, 1995 that will change the course of his life forever. A doctoral student at the University of Kansas, he writes to the estate of the Latin American author Jules Gund, requesting permission to write Gund’s authorized biography. His request is refused, but Omar has already accepted a fellowship from the university, and with his girlfriend’s vehement encouragement, he goes in person to Uruguay to petition to Gund’s three executors. Although…
- 2002 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- 2002 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 12.52
Aleksandar Hemon, author of The Question of Bruno, one of the most celebrated debuts in recent American fiction, returns with the mind- and language-bending adventures of his endearing protagonist Jozef Pronek.
This is what we know about Jozef Pronek: He is a young man from Sarajevo who left to visit the United States in 1992, just in time to watch war break out at home on TV. Stranded in the relative comfort of Chicago, he proves himself a charming and frankly perceptive observer of – and participant in – American life. With Nowhere Man, Pronek,…
Moral Hazard: A Novel
- 2002 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.52
On Wall Street, reflects Cath, women are about as welcome as fleas in a sleeping bag. Funny, liberal and left-leaning, she is an unlikely candidate to be writing speeches on derivatives in a cubicle in a Manhattan tower, “putting words in the mouths of plutocrats deeply suspicious of metaphors and words of more than two syllables”.
She finds herself on Wall Street because she needs serious money. After ten good years, her beloved older husband Bailey is suffering from Alzheimer’s. So begins Cath’s journey into two nightmare worlds. By day she deals with the…
Tourmaline: A Novel
- 2002 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.52
In the mid-1950s, Murray Murdoch transports his wife and four young sons to Elba, an island off the northwest coast of Italy, in a desperate attempt to escape the embarrassment of his financial failures in America. Seduced by the wealth promised in the island’s surfeit of semi-precious tourmaline, Murray struggles to establish a homestead and a fortune. But the allure of one of Elba’s other treasures—a bewitching local girl named Adriana Nardi—puts his quest into a tailspin. When Adriana mysteriously disappears one night, Elbans start having violent dreams in…
