Honor roll:Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction

The Corrections

Jonathan Franzen

• 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…

The Handmaid's Tale: A Novel

Margaret Atwood

• 1987 Clarke winner
• 1986 LATimes–Fiction winner
• 1985 Governor General's winner
• 1987 Prometheus finalist
• 1986 Booker shortlist
• 1986 Nebula nominee
• Score: 48.37

Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead. She may leave the home of the Commander and his wife once a day to walk to food markets whose signs are now pictures instead of words because women are no longer allowed to read. She must lie on her back once a month and pray that the Commander makes her pregnant, because in an age of declining births, Offred and the other Handmaids are only valued if their ovaries are viable. Offred can remember the days before, when she lived and made love with her husband Luke; when she played with and protected her daughter; when she had a job, money of her own, and access to knowledge. But all of that is gone now.

The March: A Novel

E.L. Doctorow

• 2006 PEN-faulkner winner
• 2005 NBCC–Fiction winner
• 2006 Pulitzer–fiction finalist
• 2005 LATimes–Fiction finalist
• 2005 NBA–Fiction finalist
• Score: 38.56

In 1864, after Union general William Tecumseh Sherman burned Atlanta, he marched his sixty thousand troops east through Georgia to the sea, and then up into the Carolinas. The army fought off Confederate forces and lived off the land, pillaging the Southern plantations, taking cattle and crops for their own, demolishing cities, and accumulating a borne-along population of freed blacks and white refugees until all that remained was the dangerous transient life of the uprooted, the dispossessed, and the triumphant. Only a master novelist could so powerfully and…

Atonement: A Novel

Ian McEwan

• 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 Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

Michael Chabon

• 2001 Pulitzer–fiction winner
• 2001 PEN-faulkner finalist
• 2001 Spectrum shortlist
• 2000 LATimes–Fiction finalist
• 2000 NBCC–Fiction finalist
• Score: 34.51

It is New York City in 1939. Joe Kavalier, a young artist who has also been trained in the art of Houdini-esque escape, has just pulled off his greatest feat to date: smuggling himself out of Nazi-occupied Prague. He is looking to make big money, fast, so that he can bring his family to freedom. His cousin, Brooklyn’s own Sammy Clay, is looking for a collaborator to create the heroes, stories, and art for the latest novelty to hit the American dreamscape: the comic book. Out of their fantasies, fears, and dreams, Joe and Sammy weave the legend of that…

A Flag for Sunrise

Robert Stone

• 1982 LATimes–Fiction winner
• 1982 NBA–Fiction finalist
• 1982 PEN-faulkner finalist
• 1982 Pulitzer–fiction finalist
• 1981 NBCC–Fiction finalist
• Score: 34.32

An emotional, dramatic and philosophical novel about Americans drawn into a small Central American country on the brink of revolution.

Gilead: A Novel

Marilynne Robinson

• 2005 Pulitzer–fiction winner
• 2004 NBCC–Fiction winner
• 2005 PEN-faulkner finalist
• 2004 LATimes–Fiction finalist
• Score: 32.55

In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames’s life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Ames is the son of an Iowan preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young man in Maine, saw a vision of Christ bound in chains and came west to Kansas to fight for abolition: He “preached men into the Civil War,” then, at age fifty, became a chaplain in the Union Army, losing his right eye in battle. Reverend Ames writes to his son about the tension between his father—an ardent pacifist—and his grandfather, whose pistol and…

Waiting

Ha Jin

• 2000 PEN-faulkner winner
• 1999 NBA–Fiction winner
• 2000 Pulitzer–fiction finalist
• 1999 LATimes–Fiction finalist
• Score: 32.5

This is the story of Lin Kong, a man living in two worlds, struggling with the conflicting claims of two utterly different women as he moves through the political minefields of a society designed to regulate his every move and stifle the promptings of his innermost heart.

For more than seventeen years, this devoted and ambitious doctor has been in love with an educated, clever, modern woman, Manna Wu. But back in the traditional world of his home village lives the wife his family chose for him when he was young—a humble and touchingly loyal woman, whom he…

A Fine Balance

Rohinton Mistry

• 1996 LATimes–Fiction winner
• 1995 Giller Prize winner
• 1997 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
• 1996 Booker shortlist
• Score: 32.46

With a compassionate realism and narrative sweep that recall the work of Charles Dickens, this magnificent novel captures all the cruelty and corruption, dignity and heroism, of India. The time is 1975. The place is an unnamed city by the sea. The government has just declared a State of Emergency, in whose upheavals four strangers—a spirited widow, a young student uprooted from his idyllic hill station, and two tailors who have fled the caste violence of their native village—will be thrust together, forced to share one cramped apartment and an uncertain…

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant: A Novel

Anne Tyler

• 1983 NBA–Fiction finalist
• 1983 PEN-faulkner finalist
• 1983 Pulitzer–fiction finalist
• 1982 LATimes–Fiction finalist
• 1982 NBCC–Fiction finalist
• Score: 30.33

Pearl Tull is nearing the end of her life but not her memory. Ever since 1944 when her husband left her, she has raised her three very different children on her own. Now grown, they have gathered together—with anger, with hope, and with a beautiful, harsh, and dazzling story to tell….