The Reader's Advisor

Pick a Prize-Winner:
A Sampling of Award-Winning Titles

POUL ANDERSON
Genesis. Tor, 2000. (John W. Campbell Award)
Astronaut Christian Brannock's personality is uploaded into a computer, achieving a sort of hybrid immortality and making it possible for him to achieve his dream of exploring the universe. A billion years later, Brannock is dispatched to Earth to check on some strange anomalies. While there, he meets Laurinda Ashcroft, another "upload" and the two join forces to investigate Gaia, the supermind dominating the planet.

GREG BEAR
Darwin's Radio. Ballantine, 1999. (Nebula)
A molecular biologist and a "virus hunter" unearth a flu-like disease that strikes only pregnant women that has been dornmant for millions of years.

JO BEVERLEY
Devilish. Thorndike, 2000. (RITA)
Unwilling to lose control of her fortune and her life, Diana Westmount, Countess of Arradale, refuses to take a husband. Bey Malloren, the Marquess of Rothgar, carries a terrible family secret, one that prevents him from ever producing an heir. Thrown together when the king demands Rothgar escort Diana to court, however, the explosive chemistry between them melts their resolve to remain uninvolved.

RHYS BOWEN
Murphy's Law. Minotaur, 2001. (Agatha)
After accidentally killing the son of a local landowner who tried to rape her, Molly Murphy escapes from her Irish village and soon finds her way on a ship to New York, only to find herself the prime suspect in another murder. While the handsome young policeman investigating the case appears to believe in Molly's innocence, the spunky lass investigates on her own behalf.

PETER CAREY
The True History of the Kelly Gang. Knopf, 1002. (Booker Prize)
As he flees from the police pursuing him, Ned Kelly--a thief and murderer to the authorities but something of a hero to Australia's lower classes--scribbles his life story on scraps of paper as a legacy to the daughter he has never seen that she may one day understand "the injustice we poor Irish suffered."

JONATHAN FRAZEN
The Corrections. FSG, 2001. (National Book Award)
As Enid Lambert contends with her ailing hisband's growing dementia, she also sees trouble brewing in the lives of their three children.

NEIL GAIMAN
American Gods. Morrow, 2001. (Bram Stoker)
After learning his wife has been killed in an accident, Shadow Moon, who has managed to escape his past, is confronted on the plane ride home by a strange man (the god Odin in disguise) who knows more about Shadow than is possible and offers him a job..

ELMER KELTON
The Way of the Coyote. T. Doherty, 2001. (Spur)
Former Texas Ranger Rusty Shannon, who had been kidnapped by the Comanche as a child, rescues 10-year-old Andy Pinkard from the same fate. While young Andy's struggles to adjust to his new life, Rusty must deal with murderous outlaws, lawmen exacting penalties from suspected former Confederates, nightriders, and the ever-dangerous Comanche bands.

RICHARD LAYMON
The Traveling Vampire Show. Cemetery Dance, 2000. (Bram Stoker Award)
Three teens determined to get into the adults-only Traveling Vampire Show get a lot more than they bargained for.

IAN McEWAN
Atonement. Talese, 2002. (National Book Critics Circle)
As the hottest day in the sweltery summer of 1935 beats down, three young people lose their innocence and their lives are forever changed by a simple misunderstanding.

URSULA K. LeGUIN
The Other Wind. Harcourt, 2001. (World Fantasy Award)
In this fifth novel in the Earthsea series, the sorcerer Alder's love for his deceased wife leads to dreams of a land of the dead where the departed reach out to him across a wall that is slowly crumbling...threatening Earthsea.

CHINA MIEVILLE
Perdido Street Station. Ballantine, 2001. (Arthur C. Clark)
While trying to restore the ability of flight to a nonhuman friend, a cruelly de-winged birdman, scientist Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin raises what turns out to be the larva of a deadly slake-moth. When it escapes and begins to ravage the city, Isaac must track down and kill all the slake-moths before the authorities catch up with him or them.

KAREN MARIE MONING
Highlander's Touch. Dell, 2000. (Rita)
While cleaning up at the museum in which she works, Lisa Stone touches a centuries old flask and finds herself back in 14th century Scotland, where the lord who put a curse on the flask has sworn to kill the bearer. Naturally the two fall in love, but many obstacles stand in their path.

V. S. NAIPAUL
Half a Life. Knopf, 2001. (Nobel Prize)
The son of a Brahmin ascetic and his lower-caste wife, Willie Chandran goes to London on a scholarship, where he mixes in immigrant and bohemian circles. After meeting with some success as a writer, he marries a woman of mixed African descent moves to her family estate in a Portuguese colony in Mozambique where he lives another unsatisfying "half life."

T. JEFFERSON PARKER
Silent Joe. Hyperion, 2001. (Edgar)
While searching for the men who murdered his adoptive father, Joe Trona uncovers the man's many murky secrets as he struggles to overcome the demons of his own past.

ANN PATCHETT
Bel Canto. HarCol., 2001. (Pen/Faulkner)
At the home of a poor South American country's vice-president, opera diva Roxanne Coss has just finished singing an aria at a lavish birthday party being held in honor of Mr. Hosokawa, a powerful Japanese businessman, when terrorists barge in and take the entire party hostage. Unfortunately their target, the country's president, has stayed home. As weeks of negotiating turns into months, terrorists and hostages forge unexpected bonds and people from different countries and continents become compatriots. And all the while captors and prisoners alike are echanted by Roxanne's singng.

SUSAN E. PHILLIPS
First Lady. Avon, 2000. (Rita)
When Nealy Litchfield Case, the beautiful widow of the assassinated U.S. president is pressured by her politically powerful father to continue in her role as "First Lady" for the new bachelor president, she runs away. While the entire Secret Service searches for her, she is hitches a ride in a Winnebago driven by a handsome man on his way to Iowa to deliver two orphaned children to their grandmother.

TIM POWERS
Declare. Morrow, 2001. (World Fantasy Award)
Almost 20 years after the failure of a deadly mission on Mount Ararat after the end of WWII, Oxford lecturer Andrew Hale is called back into Her Majesty's Secret Intelligence Service to finish the job and bring down the Communist government before Moscow can harness the powerful, other-worldly forces concentrated on the summit of the mountain, supposed site of the landing of Noah's ark.

PHILIP PULLMAN
Amber Spyglass. Knopf, 2000. (Whitbread)
In this conclusion to the "His Dark Materuals" series, Lyra and Will find themselves at the center of a battle between the forces of the Authority and those gathered by Lyra's father, Lord Asriel. Sequel to The Golden Compass (1995) and The Subtle Knife (1997).

JK ROWLING
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. AA Levine, 2000. (Hugo)
Midway through his training as a wizard, Harry Potter longs to get away from the pernicious Dursleys and go to the International Quidditch Cup, a mysterious event involving two other rival schools of magic, and a competition that hasn't happened for a hundred years. Sequel to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (1998), Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (1999), and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (1999).

RICHARD RUSSO
Empire Falls . Knopf, 2001. (Pulitzer Prize)
In a small Maine town that progress has forgotten, Miles Roby 40-year-old slings burgers at the Empire Grill and ruminates on his lost chances in life while dealing with the ordinary and eccentirc denizens who frequent the eatery.

SARAH STROHMEYER
Bubbles Unbound. Dutton, 2001. (Agatha)
Bubbles Yablonsky is Lehigh, Pennsylvania's own version of Erin Brockovich--a a tube-top-wearing, gum-snapping hairdresser who works freelance for a local newspaper in the hopes of making a better life for herself and teenaged daughter. Her investigating reporting quickly finds her up to her false eyelashes in intrigue and murder.

BRADY UDALL
The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint. Norton, 2001. (Spur)
The Dickensian story Edgar Mint, half-Apache and mostly orphaned, who survives a bizarre childhood accident (a mailman ran over his head), a hellish boarding school for Native American orphans, a well-meaning but wildly dysfunctional Mormon foster-family, and the loss of most of the illusions that are supposed to make life bearable, while all the while searching for the mailman to offer his forgiveness.

compiled by Linda Bova

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