The year in prizes
1988 Book Award Winners
19 prize categories represented, and 2 notable books from our curated collection
Toni Morrison won the Pulitzer for Beloved. Peter Carey won the Booker for Oscar and Lucinda, Richard Rhodes took the non fiction prize for The Making of the Atomic Bomb, and Naguib Mahfouz became the first Arabic language writer to win the Nobel.
Winners
In prize order. The prize name opens its full list.
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Beloved
The house at 124 Bluestone Road, outside Cincinnati, is haunted. It is 1873, and Sethe lives there with her daughter Denver and with a spite that...
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Oscar and Lucinda
Oscar Hopkins is the son of an English Plymouth Brethren minister, breaks with his father over a Christmas pudding, becomes an Anglican clergyman,...
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Paris Trout
Paris Trout owns the store in Cotton Point, Georgia, lends money to Black customers at terms he sets, and regards himself as the most rational man...
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The Middleman and Other Stories
Eleven stories, 197 pages, and almost as many kinds of American. Mukherjee had written until then about Indians abroad; here the narrators include...
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World's End
In 1968 Walter Van Brunt, twenty two, drunk and high, crashes his motorcycle into a historical marker near Peterskill, New York, in the Hudson...
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The Making of the Atomic Bomb
The Making of the Atomic Bomb is the definitive history of the invention that divided the twentieth century, told across nearly nine hundred pages...
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The Launching of Modern American Science, 1846–1876
Robert Bruce traces the three decades between 1846, the year Congress chartered the Smithsonian Institution, and 1876, the year of the Philadelphia...
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Look Homeward: A Life of Thomas Wolfe
David Herbert Donald's biography follows Thomas Wolfe from his birth in Asheville, North Carolina in 1900, the youngest of eight children, through...
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A Bright Shining Lie
A Bright Shining Lie tells the story of the Vietnam War through one man who embodied all of it: John Paul Vann, the Army lieutenant colonel who...
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Living with Risk
The oddest book on this list is a committee's: a guide to risk produced by the British Medical Association's Board of Science in 1987, written to...
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Partial Accounts: New and Selected Poems
Partial Accounts draws together new poems with a wide selection from William Meredith's earlier books, giving a career spanning look at a poet who...
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The Uplift War
In this galaxy no species reaches intelligence alone. Each is uplifted by a patron race through genetic engineering and then indentured to it for a...
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Falling Free
Leo Graf is a welding engineer, competent, dull, honest, and used to being sent wherever GalacTech needs someone to teach a technique properly. His...
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The Silence of the Lambs
A serial killer the press has named Buffalo Bill is abducting young women, starving them, and skinning them, and the FBI's Behavioral Science chief...
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Replay
Jeff Winston is 43, a radio journalist, when he dies of a heart attack in 1988. He wakes up in 1963, eighteen years old, a student at Emory...
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Old Bones
The tide at Mont St Michel comes in, the guidebooks say, at the speed of a galloping horse, and in the novel's opening it catches Guillaume du...
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Lincoln: A Photobiography
Russell Freedman follows Abraham Lincoln from a barefoot childhood on the frontier through his self taught legal career, his courtship and...
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Owl Moon
On a very cold, very quiet winter night, a child and a father walk far from their house into snowy woods to go owling, hoping to call a great...
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Palace Walk
Al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad runs his Cairo household with total authority, forbidding his wife Amina from leaving the house without his permission...
What Shaped 1988
Morrison's Pulitzer came months after the public protest over her exclusion, which has kept a question hanging over it ever since: whether the prize was a correction. Beloved has outlasted the argument entirely and is now among the most taught American novels. Mahfouz's Nobel brought Arabic fiction to a world readership, and he was stabbed in the neck by an extremist in Cairo six years later. Salman Rushdie published The Satanic Verses in September.
Published in 1988, never won a Pulitzer or Booker
These come from our Never Won a Pulitzer or Booker collection, which explains which prizes we count and the retrospective exception for Fahrenheit 451.
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Curated selectionCat's Eye
Elaine Risley, a painter returning to Toronto for a retrospective of her own work, spends the novel moving between the present exhibition and her...
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Curated selectionThe Alchemist
Santiago, a young Andalusian shepherd content with his flock and his freedom to wander, is unsettled by a recurring dream of treasure buried near...