Annal:2002 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction
From AwardAnnals
Results of the PEN/Faulkner Award in the year 2002. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 2002 Orange winner
- 2002 PEN-faulkner winner
- 2003 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- 2001 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 32.52
Somewhere in South America, at the home of the country’s vice president, a lavish birthday party is being held in honor of Mr. Hosokawa, a powerful Japanese businessman. Roxanne Coss, opera’s most revered soprano, has mesmerized the international guests with her singing. It is a perfect evening—until a band of gun-wielding terrorists breaks in through the air-conditioning vents and takes the entire party hostage. But what begins as a panicked, life-threatening scenario slowly evolves into something quite different, as terrorists and hostages forge unexpected…
Sister Noon: A Novel
- 2002 PEN-faulkner finalist
- Score: 6.52
Set in San Francisco in the Gilded Age, Sister Noon is a period mystery that showcases the wickedly wry and deliciously subversive talents readers expect of Karen Joy Fowler.
“An astonishing narrative voice, at once lyric and ironic, satiric and nostalgic. Fowler can tell stories that engage and enchant.” —San Francisco Chronicle
By dint of birth, Lizzie Hayes is part of San Francisco’s social elite. But Lizzie, so seemingly docile, hides within her a rebellious heart. All she needs is the spark that will liberate her from the ruling…
- 2002 JT Black-Fiction winner
- 2001 NBA–Fiction winner
- 2003 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
- 2002 PEN-faulkner finalist
- 2002 Pulitzer–fiction finalist
- 2001 LATimes–Fiction finalist
- 2001 NBCC–Fiction finalist
- Score: 50.52
Enid Lambert is terribly, terribly anxious. Although she would never admit it to her neighbors or her three grown children, her husband, Alfred, is losing his grip on reality. Maybe it’s the medication that Alfred takes for his Parkinson’s disease, or maybe it’s his negative attitude, but he spends his days brooding in the basement and committing shadowy, unspeakable acts. More and more often, he doesn’t seem to understand a word Enid says.
Trouble is also brewing in the lives of Enid’s children. Her older son, Gary, a banker in Philadelphia, has turned cruel…
- 2002 PEN-faulkner finalist
- Score: 6.52
A Simple Tale is the moving account of Maria Poniatowski, a woman born in the Ukraine between the two World Wars, taken by the Germans for slave labor, and eventually relocated as a displaced person to Canada. She and her husband settle in Toronto. They struggle to build a new life there and provide their son Radek with every opportunity. But a gulf widens between mother and son. What of the past is she to preserve, and how to avoid letting its weight burden the present? Maria’s story is about the moments of connection and isolation that are, ultimately,…
The Death of Vishnu: A Novel
- 2002 PEN-faulkner finalist
- 2001 Kiriyama-Fiction finalist
- 2001 LATimes–1st Fiction finalist
- Score: 18.52
At the opening of this masterful debut novel, Vishnu lies dying on the staircase he inhabits while his neighbors the Pathaks and the Asranis argue over who will pay for an ambulance. As the action spirals up through the floors of the apartment building we are pulled into the drama of the residents’ lives: Mr. Jalal’s obsessive search for higher meaning; Vinod Taneja’s longing for the wife he has lost; the comic elopement of Kavita Asrani, who fancies herself the heroine of a Hindi movie. Suffused with Hindu mythology, this story of one apartment building becomes…
