1995 Book Award Winners
Carol Shields won the Pulitzer for The Stone Diaries and Pat Barker won the Booker for The Ghost Road, closing her Regeneration trilogy about the First World War. Philip Roth took the National Book Award for Sabbath's Theater, and Seamus Heaney received the Nobel.
17 prizes awarded · 2 notable books that won nothing · Pulitzer Prize for Fiction to Nobel Prize in Literature
Winners
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The Stone Diaries
Daisy Goodwill is born in 1905 on a kitchen floor in a Manitoba quarry town, to a mother so large she did not know she was pregnant and who dies...
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The Ghost Road
The last months of 1918. Billy Prior, a working class officer with a scar where his accent used to be, is passed fit and sent back to France once...
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Sabbath's Theater
Mickey Sabbath is sixty four, a former underground puppeteer with wrecked, arthritic hands, run out of his college teaching job by scandal,...
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The Beak of the Finch
Jonathan Weiner spends the book inside the fieldwork of biologists Peter and Rosemary Grant, who have returned nearly every year since the 1970s to...
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No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II
No Ordinary Time follows Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt through the Second World War, from spring 1940, as the Phoney War in Europe ended and real...
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Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life
Joan D. Hedrick's biography follows Harriet Beecher Stowe from a Litchfield, Connecticut childhood as the sixth of eleven children born to the...
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The Haunted Land
When communism fell in 1989, the new democracies of Central Europe inherited a question no revolution escapes: what do you do with the people who...
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The Consumer's Good Chemical Guide
Emsley's premise is that the public's chemical education is conducted almost entirely by scares, and his book is the antidote: a chemist walks...
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The Simple Truth
Thirty three poems that move between elegy and prayer, written by a poet who spent his early adulthood in Detroit factories and never stopped...
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My Alexandria
My Alexandria is one of the essential books of the AIDS epidemic, and it was written inside the catastrophe rather than after it: Mark Doty's...
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Mirror Dance
Mark is Miles Vorkosigan's clone, grown on another planet and surgically shaped to replace him in an assassination plot that failed. He is short,...
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The Terminal Experiment
Peter Hobson is a biomedical engineer in Toronto who, as a student, watched an organ donor's heart being removed while the monitors suggested the...
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Zombie
Quentin P. is thirty one, on probation for a molestation charge his family has agreed to consider a misunderstanding, living in his grandmother's...
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The Red Scream
Molly Cates writes true crime for a Texas magazine, and her first book has just been published: the definitive account of Louie Bronk, a drifter...
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Walk Two Moons
Thirteen year old Salamanca Tree Hiddle is riding cross country from Ohio toward Idaho with her grandparents, retracing the route her mother took...
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Smoky Night
A boy named Daniel and his mother watch fires and looting spread through their Los Angeles neighborhood, forcing them to leave their apartment...
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Death of a Naturalist
Death of a Naturalist is Seamus Heaney's first collection, thirty four poems published when he was twenty seven, and it stays close to the County...
What Shaped 1995
Heaney's Nobel honoured a poet from Northern Ireland who had written through the Troubles without ever letting his work be conscripted by either side, and it came the year after the paramilitary ceasefires. Barker's trilogy did something similar for the First World War, returning to it eighty years on through the psychiatrist W. H. R. Rivers and the soldiers he was treating and sending back. A bomb destroyed the federal building in Oklahoma City in April.
Published in 1995, Won Nothing
Prize committees miss books every year. These came out in 1995 and took no major award.
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No major prizeBeach Music
Jack McCall, a South Carolina born food and travel writer, has been living in Rome since 1980, raising his young daughter Leah alone after his wife...
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No major prizeHigh Fidelity
Rob Fleming, a record shop owner in north London in his mid thirties, opens the novel ranking his five most memorable heartbreaks just after his...