2005 Book Award Winners
Marilynne Robinson won the Pulitzer for Gilead, her second novel, published twenty four years after her first. John Banville won the Booker for The Sea, Joan Didion took the National Book Award for The Year of Magical Thinking, and Harold Pinter received the Nobel.
20 prizes awarded · 4 notable books that won nothing · Pulitzer Prize for Fiction to Nobel Prize in Literature
Winners
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Gilead
It is 1956 and the Reverend John Ames, seventy six years old and dying of a bad heart, is writing a letter to his seven year old son. The boy will...
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The Sea
Max Morden, a retired art historian, has gone back to the seaside village where his family took cheap lodgings the summer he was eleven. His wife...
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Europe Central
A telephone rings somewhere in the dark between Berlin and Moscow, and an unnamed operator, part narrator, part surveillance apparatus, begins...
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We Need to Talk About Kevin
Eva Khatchadourian writes letters to her husband Franklin, and the letters are the novel. Their subject is their son Kevin, who two days before his...
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Ghost Wars
Steve Coll traces the CIA's secret involvement in Afghanistan from the Soviet invasion of 1979 through the eve of September 11, 2001, built from...
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Washington's Crossing
David Hackett Fischer opens Washington's Crossing with Emanuel Leutze's famous 1851 painting of the scene before turning to what actually happened...
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de Kooning: An American Master
Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan spent roughly ten years writing this life of Willem de Kooning, following him from a working class childhood in...
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The Year of Magical Thinking
On the night of December 30, 2003, John Gregory Dunne sat down to dinner in the apartment he shared with Joan Didion, his wife and collaborator of...
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Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B.S. Johnson
B.S. Johnson was a British experimental novelist who believed the conventional novel was a lie, who published a book in loose sections in a box so...
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Critical Mass
Ball's subject is an old dream renewed: a physics of society. Thomas Hobbes, writing amid civil war, tried to derive government from Galilean first...
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Delights & Shadows
Delights & Shadows pays close attention to small Midwestern scenes: aging bodies, the weather, a father's memory, the ordinary furniture of rural...
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Rapture
Rapture is a single love affair told in one long sequence of poems, from the first unbidden thought of the beloved to the last cold survey of what...
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Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
English magic died three hundred years ago and is now a subject for gentlemen scholars who study it and do not practise it. Then Mr Norrell, a...
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Camouflage
Two immortal shapeshifters have been on Earth for a very long time and do not know about each other. The changeling arrived a million years ago,...
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Creepers
Creepers is the slang for urban explorers, the trespassers who infiltrate sealed buildings to document what time is doing to them, and Morrell's...
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Dread in the Beast
A clear warning before anything else, because a recommendation without one would be useless here. This is extreme horror, and it is extreme by the...
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California Girl
The Becker brothers grow up in Tustin when Orange County is still orange groves, and Parker opens with the 1954 afternoon that fixes everything: a...
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Kira-Kira
Katie Takeshima grows up worshipping her older sister Lynn, who teaches her the Japanese word kira kira, meaning glittering, and uses it as a...
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Kitten's First Full Moon
A small, hungry kitten sees the full moon for the very first time and is entirely certain it is a bowl of milk hanging in the sky. She stretches...
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The Birthday Party
Stanley Webber, a former pianist somewhere in his late thirties, has been the only lodger for some time at a rundown seaside boarding house run by...
What Shaped 2005
Robinson had published Housekeeping in 1980 and then nothing for a generation, and Gilead, a dying minister's letter to his young son, won the Pulitzer and began a late career of remarkable books. Didion wrote The Year of Magical Thinking in the months after her husband died suddenly while their daughter lay in a coma, and it changed how grief is written about. Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans in August 2005.
Published in 2005, Won Nothing
Prize committees miss books every year. These came out in 2005 and took no major award.
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No major prizeNever Let Me Go
Kathy H., a thirty one year old carer, narrates her memories of growing up with Ruth and Tommy at Hailsham, an English boarding school that seems...
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No major prizeThe Book Thief
Death itself narrates the story of Liesel Meminger, a foster child sent to live with Hans and Rosa Hubermann on Himmel Street in a town outside...
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No major prizeThe Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Mikael Blomkvist, a financial journalist facing prison after losing a libel suit against the industrialist Hans Erik Wennerstrom, takes a private...
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No major prizeThe Historian
An unnamed narrator finds a mysterious old book, its pages blank except for a woodcut of a dragon, hidden in her father's library, and asks him...