Annal:2007 Kiriyama Prize for Fiction

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Results of the Kiriyama Prize in the year 2007. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman

Haruki Murakami

Following the best-selling triumph of “Kafka on the Shore,” comes a collection that generously expresses Murakami’s mastery. From the surreal to the mundane, these stories exhibit his ability to transform the full range of human experience in ways that are instructive, surprising, and relentlessly entertaining. As Richard Eder has written in the “Los Angeles Times Book Review,” “He addresses the fantastic and the natural, each with the same mix of gravity and lightness.”

 

Behold the Many: A Novel

Lois-Ann Yamanaka

In 1913, stricken by tuberculosis, young Anah, Aki, and Leah are sent away from their family for treatment at St. Josephs, an orphanage in Hawaiis Kalihi Valley. Of the three, two will die there, and only Anah, the eldest, will survive. But the ghosts of the dead sisters will haunt Anah as she prepares to begin married life away from the orphanage. Desperate for the love of their sister, but jealous of her ability to live in the physical world, they are determined to thwart Anahs happiness. As Anah struggles to appease the dead, it becomes apparent that only through one of her own daughters can redemption be attained.

 

Certainty: A Novel

Madeleine Thien

As a child, Gail’s father, Matthew Lim, lived in a Malaysian village occupied by the Japanese. He and his beloved Ani wandered the jungle fringe under the terrifying shadow of war. The war shattered their families, splitting the two apart until a brief reunion years later. Matthew’s profound connection to Ani and the life-changing secrets they shared cast a shadow that, later still, Matthew’s wife, Clara, desperately sought to understand. Gail’s journey to unravel the mystery of her parents' lives will bring her face-to-face, with the untold mysteries of her own life.

 

The Inheritance of Loss: A Novel

Kiran Desai

Kiran Desai’s first novel, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard, was published to unanimous acclaim in over twenty-two countries. Now Desai takes us to the northeastern Himalayas where a rising insurgency challenges the old way of life.

In a crumbling, isolated house at the foot of Mount Kanchenjunga lives an embittered old judge who wants to retire in peace when his orphaned granddaughter Sai arrives on his doorstep. The judge’s chatty cook watches over her, but his thoughts are mostly with his son, Biju, hopscotching from one New York restaurant job to…

 

Stick Out Your Tongue: Stories

Ma Jian

In this profound work of fiction, a Chinese writer whose marriage has fallen apart travels to Tibet. As he wanders through the countryside, he witnesses the sky burial of a Tibetan woman who died during childbirth, shares a tent with a nomad who is walking to a sacred mountain to seek forgiveness for sleeping with his daughter, meets a silversmith who has hung the wind-dried corpse of his lover on the wall of his cave, and hears the story of a young female incarnate lama who died during a Buddhist initiation rite…

 
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