Annal:2003 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction

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Results of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in the year 2003. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:

Personality

Andrew O'Hagan

Maria Tambini is a thirteen-year-old girl with an amazing singing voice. Growing up above her mother’s shop on the Scottish island of Bute, living at the centre of her family’s dream of fame, Maria is an extraordinary girl making ready to escape the ordinary life.

We first meet her amidst the faded grandeur of the seaside resort of Rothesay, with the Argyll hills and the Eighties in front of her, and behind her a long shadow: the secret story of her Italian-immigrant family. When Maria wins a national TV talent show she is taken to London and becomes an…

 

Middlesex

Jeffrey Eugenides

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…

 

The Crimson Petal and the White: A Novel

Michel Faber

At the Heart of this panoramic, multidimensional narrative is the compelling struggle of a young woman to lift her body and soul out of the gutter. Michel Faber leads us back to 1870s London, where Sugar, a nineteen-year-old whore in the brothel of the terrifying Mrs. Castaway, yearns for escape into a better life. Her ascent through the strata of Victorian society offers us intimacy with a host of lovable, maddening, unforgettable characters.

They begin with William Rackham, an egotistical perfume magnate whose ambition is fueled by his lust for Sugar, and…

 

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time: A Novel

Mark Haddon

Christopher Boone is a fifteen and has Asperger's, a form of autism. He knows a great deal about math and very little about human beings. When he finds his neighbors's dog murdered he sets out on a terrifying journey which will turn his world upside down.

 
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