March 2008

Fiction Winner
Mister Pip
by Lloyd Jones

It's difficult not to think of Lord of the Flies when reading New Zealand writer Lloyd Jones' brilliant and compelling work of fiction, Mr. Pip. It's narrated by an eloquent 13-year-old native of a remote, South Pacific island called Bougainville, named Matilda Laimo. As Civil War breaks out, she tells of how an all-powerful mining company arranges for the evacuation of nearly all the white residents, leaving the islanders to the mercy of local rebels and the ravages of soldiers flown in by helicopter.

Fiction Finalist
The Complete Stories
by David Malouf

The narrative voices in David Malouf's brilliant Complete Stories share a haunting specificity. They are often the voices of children, powerful in their bluntness and perceptiveness, but also puzzled—about their identities, their relationships to others, what they seem to have lost or missed out on. Malouf is the prize-winning author of 10 novels and six volumes of poetry, and his language is gorgeous—incantatory, Faulknerian, often biblical. It startles and seduces, a scrim of dream which overlays a structure as carefully rendered as a poem or a piece of music.

Reviewed by Abby Pollack

Fiction Finalist
The Last Chinese Chef
by Nicole Mones

In Nicole Mones's delicious novel, The Last Chinese Chef, we learn that during the dark years of Mao's Cultural Revolution, sumptuous feasts were restricted. The rules differed by regions. In some areas, guests were to be served no animal meats besides chicken, fish and pork. Bamboo shoots, kelp and lentil noodles were also forbidden. New Year feasts were banned in the West Third District, while in Hengshan County no more than eight dishes could be served at a banquet. While human rights violations in 1960s China have been widely documented, the fate of the great chefs has been less well known. They too, were considered enemies of the regime.

Reviewed by Judy Stoffman

Fiction Finalist
I Love Dollars
by Zhu Wen

There are not many writers who can turn a story about a man helping another man piss into a plastic green bottle into a work of biting humor and profound tragedy. Or who can make the words, "Ah, Xiao Xie," summon up the terrible waste of a life frittered away. But Zhu Wen is such a writer. He knows how to traverse the absurd and the tragic, how to bring a reader face-to-face with her own cheapness and folly, her own endless craving for the fat roll of dollars that will make all the ugliness disappear. To read Zhu Wen's I Love Dollars is to come to know a China defined not by its 4,000-year monumental history but by the present moment—in all its desperate striving and raw humanity.

Reviewed by Madeleine Thien

Nonfiction Finalist
The Father of All Things: A Marine, His Son, and the Legacy of Vietnam
by Tom Bissell

Images and memories usually emerge in a tangled coil when Americans remember the Vietnam War. It's a time that refuses to take on the detachment that comes with becoming part of past history, and remains so unexamined and raw that it still haunts two nations. For many in the United States, the demand of "Peace now" that echoed through the sixties remains unfulfilled, and the issues that divided the country then continue to gape, unbridged, decades after the war came to an end.

Nonfiction Finalist
East Wind Melts the Ice: A Memoir through the Seasons
by Liza Dalby

Liza Dalby, the author of Geisha, has written a beautiful book, a major departure from the other books she has published. This book is beautiful in many ways. It is wonderully designed, it feels good to hold, it is printed on beautiful paper, the fonts are well chosen to complement the texts, and the illustrations and symbols are subtle, but most of all, it is written in lyrical prose that has a meditative quality. East Wind Melts the Ice is a series of expressions that reflect ancient Chinese and Japanese cultures. It's also a contemplation on gardening and the four seasons.

Nonfiction Finalist
India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy
by Ramachandra Guha

Although the sheer size of this book appears daunting, India After Gandhi is a remarkably engaging read. Ramachandra Guha, noted Indian journalist and historian, has set himself the high task of writing a narrative history of post-partition modern India. He begins with a prologue that outlines his strategy and exposes the terrain of his analysis. The prologue, aptly enough, is titled "Unnatural Nation." Guha's book attempts to answer the mystifying question of why there is an India at all given its complex social and political diversity. The book covers over six decades of post-partition Indian history, narrating as it were, the story of its modern nationhood.

Reviewed by Sally Ito