Award Winning Reads 2011
Annotation:The Hugo & Nebula Awards - Best Novel 2010, shared with "Blackout". Stunning sequel to "Blackout" in which three Oxford historians try to dodge German bombers and find their way back home when they find themselves trapped in 1940. In 2060, their supervisor and a seventeen year old associate embark upon a desperate search to find them.
Place a Hold
Annotation:The Hugo & Nebula Awards - Best Novel 2010 shared with "All Clear". Three Oxford historians try to dodge German bombers and find their way back home when they find themselves trapped in 1940. In 2060, their supervisor and a seventeen year old associate embark upon a desperate search to find them.
Annotation:The Governor General's Literary Award 2010. Over the course of a single day in the small town of Juliet, Saskatchewan secrets are revealed, marriages tested and a life ended.
Annotation:The Gold Daggar Award 2010. Boyhood pals in rural Mississippi, Larry and Silas formed an enduring friendship and bond growing up together in the late 1970's despite the disparity of their home situations. One night Larry takes a girl on a date, and she is never heard from again. Lives are changed forever.
Annotation:The Giller Prize 2011. Sid, a musician, returns to Paris to come to terms with the disappearance of fellow jazz musician Hiero, a Black German citizen, 50 years ago when he was arrested by the Nazis. Edugyan's lyricism and evocation of the time period have won her many accolades. Also short-listed for the Man Booker Award.
Annotation:The Lambda Literary Awards - Best Transgender Fiction 2011. Three lives become entangled, putting in motion a roller coaster ride of intense emotions: a female-to-male transgender paramedic who tries to escape from the tragic circumstances he see daily; Amy, an aspiring filmmaker and ex-girlfriend, who is still dependent on her wealthy parents; and anxiety ridden Billy, a former child singing star.
Annotation:IMPAC Dublin Literary Award 2011. In August, 1974, a mysterious tightrope walker leaps between the Twin Towers. In the streets below, ordinary lives are transformed. An intricate portrait of a city and its people, illuminating the pain and promise of new York City in the 1970's.
Annotation:Edgar Allan Poe Award - Best Mystery/Crime Novel 2011. Silenced by a traumatic event at the age of eight, Michael was pushed into a life of crime based upon his extraordinary talent at lock-picking. He now sees an opportunity to risk all and escape his current life to return home to the only person he has ever loved.
Annotation:The Lambda Literary Awards - Best Bisexual Fiction 2010. Horatio, a poet and divinity scholar, is a sceptic and intellectual debater able to argue from any position. When he meets the prince of Denmark, a handsome and colourful rabble-rouser, Horatio learns life is so much more than scholarly pursuits and battles.
Annotation:The Commonwealth Writers' Prize - Best Book 2010. As a psychologist living in England, Adrian Lockheart chooses a different escape plan than many dissatisfied with their life - he arrives in Freetown, Sierra Leone, in the midst of a civil war. What he finds are people living in extraordinary circumstances, weighed down by the country's past and secrets that remain buried.
Annotation:The Costa Book Award - Best Fiction 2011. Jean-Baptiste Baratte, a young, provincial engineer, receives orders from the king to demolish Paris's oldest cemetery situated in the city's heart. The overcrowded circumstances in the cemetery are having devastating health consequences for those who live nearby. Barrate, a man of reason, soon begins to believe that the decay and fetid conditions might very well lead to his own demise.
Annotation:Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize 2010; The Commonwealth Writers' Prize Best Regional - Caribbean & Canada 2010. Unknown to Jack, he and his mother have been imprisoned in a tiny garden shed in the backyard of a sociopath for years. After his fifth birthday, his mother attempts a daring escape.
Annotation:The National Book Award 2011. Esch, motherless, 14 and pregnant, lives with three brothers and a largely absent alcoholic father. As an approaching hurricane threatens their coastal town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, Esch and her brothers try to beat the odds in spite of the impoverished and brutal conditions they live in.
Annotation:The Man Booker Prize 2011. An unexpected letter and bequest arrives from a lawyer, provoking Tony Webster, now middle-aged and divorced, to reassess and uncover truths about past relationships with a first love and group of public school friends.
Annotation:The Giller Prize 2010. This debut novel follows the relationship between a father and daughter enveloped in the tragic memories of the Vietnam War. It chronicles a daughter's search for the truth behind her dying father's past.
Annotation:The Governor General's Literary Award 2011; Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize 2011. Meet Charlie and Eli Sisters, a blood brothers-in-arms team of killers for hire. During the Gold Rush, life in Oregon City is short, shocking and violent. The team is assigned a job in San Francisco. On the journey there, Charlie is given cause to reconsider his current occupation. This is a darkly humorous odyssey renewing the classic Old West. Also short-listed for the Giller and Man Booker Awards.
Annotation:The Orange Prize for Fiction 2011. Natalia, a young physician, embarks on a journey to determine why her grandfather, a rational man, would spend his dying days in search of a figure at the centre of many stories from her childhood. In her search for the truth about the "deathless man", a vagabond who claimed to be immortal, she uncovers the astonishing story of the tiger's wife.
Annotation:The Costa Book Award - Best First Novel 2011. Forced from their comfortable home in Lagos, twelve year old Blessing and her fourteen year old brother, Ezikiel, move in with their mother's family into a modest home without running water or electricity. With her mother often away, her brother under the influence of a local gang, and her grandfather turning increasingly to Islam, Blessing finds comfort in her grandmother who teaches her how to be a midwife.
Annotation:The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2011. An aging record executive and former punk rocker, and a troubled young female employee come to terms with their past with a powerful, yet nuanced, exchange on youthful rebellion, friendships and loyalty, and the redeeming nature of art and music.
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A listing of this past year's international award-winning titles created by Vancouver Public Library's Popular Reading Library.
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