1997 Book Award Winners
Arundhati Roy won the Booker for The God of Small Things, her first novel. Charles Frazier took the National Book Award for Cold Mountain, Frank McCourt won the Pulitzer for Angela's Ashes, and Dario Fo received the Nobel.
18 prizes awarded · 2 notable books that won nothing · Pulitzer Prize for Fiction to Nobel Prize in Literature
Winners
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Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer
Martin Dressler is the son of a cigar shop owner in New York in the 1880s. He is a good boy with an unusual gift for seeing what a business could...
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The God of Small Things
Rahel and Estha are two egg twins, a girl and a boy, growing up in Ayemenem in Kerala in 1969 in a family that owns a pickle factory. Their mother...
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Cold Mountain
A wounded Confederate soldier stands at a hospital window in Raleigh in the last autumn of the war, and decides. Inman has been shot through the...
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Fugitive Pieces
Jakob Beer is seven when the Nazis come to his Polish village. He hides, hears what happens to his parents, and never learns what happened to his...
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Ashes to Ashes
Richard Kluger traces the American cigarette industry across roughly a century, from tobacco's transformation into a mass produced consumer product...
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Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution
Jack Rakove examines how the United States Constitution was actually written and ratified, from the 1787 convention in Philadelphia through the...
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Angela's Ashes: A Memoir
This is Frank McCourt's own account of a childhood spent crossing back and forth between two countries and never having enough of anything. Born in...
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American Sphinx
American Sphinx is not a full biography of Thomas Jefferson but something more useful, a study of his character, conducted at five revealing...
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The Wisdom of the Bones
In 1984, on the west side of Lake Turkana in Kenya, a member of Richard Leakey's team spotted a matchbook sized piece of skull in the lag gravel,...
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Alive Together: New and Selected Poems
Alive Together gathers new poems together with a wide selection from Lisel Mueller's earlier books, moving across a career built out of her own...
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God's Gift to Women
God's Gift to Women confirmed Don Paterson as the most formidable British poet of his generation, a Dundee jazz guitarist who had come to poetry...
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Blue Mars
The third and final volume of the Mars trilogy, and it begins where a normal series would end. The second revolution has succeeded, Earth's grip is...
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The Moon and the Sun
Versailles in 1693. Marie Josephe de la Croix is lady in waiting to a duchess, a gifted amateur composer and mathematician, and entirely dependent...
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Children of the Dusk
In 1940 the Nazi government drew up serious plans to deport Europe's Jews to Madagascar. The plan was real, it was studied, and it was abandoned....
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The Chatham School Affair
Henry Griswald is an old Cape Cod lawyer drafting his will, the last custodian of the event his town still calls the Chatham School Affair, and...
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The View from Saturday
Mrs. Eva Marie Olinski, a paraplegic sixth grade teacher returning to the classroom after an accident, chooses four unlikely students, Noah, Nadia,...
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Golem
In Prague in 1580, the city's Jewish community faces a blood libel, the centuries old, false accusation that Jews use Christian blood in religious...
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Accidental Death of an Anarchist
A man calling himself only the Maniac talks his way into a Milan police station by claiming, falsely and repeatedly, to be whatever official the...
What Shaped 1997
Roy's debut sold in the millions and she then published no fiction for twenty years, turning instead to political writing about dams, nuclear weapons and the Indian state. McCourt was a retired New York schoolteacher when Angela's Ashes, his account of a Limerick childhood of extreme poverty, became a global bestseller and won the Pulitzer. J. K. Rowling published the first Harry Potter book in June 1997 to a print run of five hundred copies.
Published in 1997, Won Nothing
Prize committees miss books every year. These came out in 1997 and took no major award.
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No major prizeInto Thin Air
Jon Krakauer, a journalist and experienced climber, joins a guided commercial expedition to the summit of Mount Everest in May 1996, assigned by...
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No major prizeUnderworld
The novel opens with a meticulously reconstructed account of the October 3, 1951 Giants Dodgers pennant game, the day Bobby Thomson hit the home...