Annal:2002 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the National Book Critics Circle Award 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.
- 2003 Pulitzer–fiction winner
- 2004 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- 2003 JT Black-Fiction shortlist
- 2002 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 28.53
In the spring of 1974, Calliope Stephanides, a student at a girls’ school in Grosse Pointe, finds herself drawn to a chain-smoking, strawberry blond classmate with a gift for acting. The passion that furtively develops between them—along with Callie’s failure to develop—leads Callie to suspect that she is not like other girls. In fact, she is not really a girl at all.
The explanation for this shocking state of affairs takes us out of suburbia—back before the Detroit race riots of 1967, before the rise of the Motor City and Prohibition, to 1922, when the Turks…
- 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,…
- 2003 PEN-faulkner finalist
- 2002 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 12.53
You’ve never met a politician like Roscoe (or have you?): a suave Falstaffian in a double-breasted white Palm Beach suit, unscrupulous, brilliant, exploding with courtly romance. It’s V-J Day, the war’s over, and Roscoe, after twenty-six years as chief braintruster of Albany’s notorious political machine, decides to quit politics forever. But there’s no exit, only new political wars, mysterious death, self-destructive party feuds, and scandalous threats to his beloved and her family.
Roscoe, the chivalrous warrior, turns his own life, and everybody else’s,…
The Darts of Cupid and Other Stories
- 2002 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 6.52
In The Darts of Cupid, Edith Templeton, now eighty-five, gives us a sweeping and intimate exposé of her century, and of the lives of women caught in the historic and personal contingencies it engendered. The unforgettable title story was celebrated upon its original publication in The New Yorker for its explicit portrayal of the relationship between a young British woman and her American superior in a provincial war office during World War II—a love affair that lasted only two nights but changed the narrator’s life forever, and is still haunting…
