Award
Los Angeles Times Book Prize
The Los Angeles Times Book Prize honors outstanding books across a range of genres, recognizing works that contribute meaningfully to literature and culture. Established in 1980 and presented annually by the Los Angeles Times, it celebrates both established authors and emerging voices, with winners chosen by panels of writers, critics, and industry experts.
2025
Fiction
Palaver
In Tokyo, the son works as an English tutor, drinking his nights away with friends at a gay bar. He’s entangled in a sexual relationship with a married man, and while he has built a chosen family in Japan, he is estranged from his family in Houston, particularly his mother, whose preference for the...
2024
Fiction
Say Hello to My Little Friend
Failed Pitbull impersonator Ismael Reyes—you can call him Izzy—might not be the Scarface type, but why should that keep him from trying? Growing up in Miami has shaped him into someone who dreams of being the King of the 305, with the money, power, and respect he assumes comes with it. After finding...
2023
Fiction
Same Bed Different Dreams
In 1919, far-flung patriots establish the Korean Provisional Government to protest the Japanese occupation of their country. This government-in-exile proves mostly symbolic, though, and after Japan’s defeat in World War II, the KPG dissolves and civil war erupts, resulting in the tragic North-South...
2022
Fiction
Solenoid
Based on Cărtărescu's own experience as a high school teacher, Solenoid begins with the mundane details of a diarist's life and quickly spirals into a philosophical account of life, history, philosophy, and mathematics. The novel is grounded in the reality of Romania in the late 1970s and early...
2021
Fiction
American Estrangement
These are people contending with internal struggles—a son’s fractured relationship with his father, the death of a mother, the loss of a job, drug addiction—even as they are battered by larger, often invisible, economic, political, and racial forces of American society.
Searing, intimate, often...
2020
Fiction
Likes
In nine stories that range from the real to the unreal, strange to familiar, funny to frightening, Likes explores the full range and contradictions of our current moment. Through unexpected visitors, Waldorf school fairs, aging indie-film stars, capitalist shell games, and the Instagram posts of a...
2019
Fiction
The Topeka School
Adam Gordon is a senior at Topeka High School, class of ’97. His mother, Jane, is a famous feminist author; his father, Jonathan, is an expert at getting “lost boys” to open up. They both work at a psychiatric clinic that has attracted staff and patients from around the world. Adam is a renowned...
2018
Fiction
The Great Believers
In 1985, Yale Tishman, the development director for an art gallery in Chicago, is about to pull off an amazing coup, bringing in an extraordinary collection of 1920s paintings as a gift to the gallery. Yet as his career begins to flourish, the carnage of the AIDS epidemic grows around him. One by...
2017
Fiction
Exit West
In a country teetering on the brink of civil war, two young people meet—sensual, fiercely independent Nadia and gentle, restrained Saeed. They embark on a furtive love affair, and are soon cloistered in a premature intimacy by the unrest roiling their city. When it explodes, turning familiar streets...
2016
Fiction
Imagine Me Gone
When Margaret's fiancée, John, is hospitalized for depression in 1960s London, she faces a choice: carry on with their plans despite what she now knows of his condition, or back away from the suffering it may bring her. She decides to marry him.
Imagine Me Gone is the unforgettable story of what...
2015
Fiction
The Story of My Teeth
Gustavo 'Highway' Sanchez is a man with a mission: he is planning to replace every last one of his unsightly teeth. He has a few skills that might help him on his way: he can imitate Janis Joplin after two rums, he can interpret Chinese fortune cookies, he can stand an egg upright on a table, and he...
2014
Fiction
The Blazing World
After years of having her work ignored or dismissed by critics, artist Harriet Burden decides to conduct an experiment: she presents her own art behind three male masks, concealing her female identity.
Yet when the shows succeed and Burden steps forward for her triumphant reveal, she is betrayed by...
2013
Fiction
A Tale for the Time Being
In Tokyo, sixteen-year-old Nao has decided there’s only one escape from her aching loneliness and her classmates’ bullying. But before she ends it all, Nao first plans to document the life of her great grandmother, a Buddhist nun who’s lived more than a century. A diary is Nao’s only solace—and will...
2012
Fiction
Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
Three minutes and forty-three seconds of intensive warfare with Iraqi insurgents—caught on tape by an embedded Fox News crew—has transformed the eight surviving men of Bravo Squad into America’s most sought-after heroes. Now they’re on a media-intensive nationwide tour to reinvigorate public support...
2011
Fiction
Luminarium
Fred Brounian and his twin brother, George, were once co-CEOs of a burgeoning New York City software company devoted to the creation of utopian virtual worlds. Now, in the summer of 2006, as two wars rage and the fifth anniversary of 9/11 approaches, George has fallen into a coma, control of the...
2010
Fiction
A Visit From the Goon Squad
A Visit from the Goon Squad is a novel told through a series of interconnected stories that move across time, place, and perspective, centering on the music industry and the lives it shapes. At its core are Bennie Salazar, a record executive grappling with the erosion of his once-passionate...
2009
Fiction
A Happy Marriage
A Happy Marriage, Yglesias’s return to fiction after a thirteen-year hiatus, was inspired by his relationship with his wife, who died in 2004. Both intimate and expansive, it is a stunningly candid novel that alternates between the romantic misadventures of the first weeks of the courtship of...
2008
Fiction
Home
Glory Boughton, aged thirty-eight, has returned to Gilead to care for her dying father, Reverend Robert Boughton. Soon her brother, Jack—the prodigal son of the family, gone for twenty years—comes home too, looking for refuge, and trying to make peace with his turbulent past.
When he was a child he...
2007
Fiction
Be Near Me
"Always trust a stranger," said David’s mother when he returned from Rome. "It’s the people you know who let you down."
Half a life later, David is Father Anderton, a Catholic priest with a small parish in Scotland. He befriends Mark and Lisa, rebellious local teenagers who live in a world he...
2006
Fiction
Black Swan Green
Black Swan Green tracks a single year in what is, for thirteen-year-old Jason Taylor, the sleepiest village in muddiest Worcestershire in a dying Cold War England, 1982. But the thirteen chapters, each a short story in its own right, create an exquisitely observed world that is anything but sleepy....
2005
Fiction
Memories of My Melancholy Whores
On the eve of his ninetieth birthday a bachelor decides to give himself a wild night of love with a virgin. As is his habit–he has purchased hundreds of women–he asks a madam for her assistance. The fourteen-year-old girl who is procured for him is enchanting, but exhausted as she is from caring for...
2004
Fiction
The Master
Beautiful and profoundly moving, The Master tells the story of Henry James, a man born into one of America’s first intellectual families who leaves his country in the late nineteenth century to live in Paris, Rome, Venice, and London among privileged artists and writers.
The emotional intensity of...
2003
Fiction
Train
Train is an 18-year-old black caddy at an exclusive L.A. country club. He is a golf prodigy, but the year is 1953 and there is no such thing as a black golf prodigy. Nevertheless, Train draws the interest of Miller Packard, a gambler whose smiling, distracted air earned him the nickname “the Mile...
2002
Fiction
Atonement
On a hot summer day in 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis witnesses a moment’s flirtation between her older sister, Cecilia, and Robbie Turner, the son of a servant and Cecilia’s childhood friend. But Briony’s incomplete grasp of adult motives—together with her precocious literary gifts—brings...
2001
Fiction
Why Did I Ever
Three husbands have left her. I.R.S. agents are whamming on her door. And her beloved cat has gone missing. She's back and forth between Melanie, her secluded Southern town, and L.A., where she has a weakening grasp on her job as a script doctor. Having been sacked by most of the studios and...
2000
Fiction
Assorted Fire Events
Assorted Fire Events is a collection of thirteen short stories that examines loss, regret, loneliness, violence, and the fragile connections between people. Rather than following a single plot, the book presents a wide range of characters across the American landscape, including grieving spouses,...
1999
Fiction
Freedom Song
Freedom Song--which collects three of Chaudhuri's novels--celebrates the rhythms of modern India. A boy's visit with relatives conjures the melancholy comforts of family. An Indian student at an English university contemplates the conflicted relationship between an immigrant and his homeland. And...
1998
Fiction
The Rings of Saturn
The Rings of Saturn, with its curious archive of photographs, records a walking tour of the eastern coast of England. A few of the things that cross the path and mind of its narrator (who both is and is not Sebald) are lonely eccentrics. Rembrandt's "Anatomy Lesson", the natural history of the...
1997
Fiction
In the Rogue Blood
The offspring of a mother of ill repute and a homicidal father, Edward and John Little are driven from their home in the Florida swamplands by a scheming parent's treacheries, and by a shameful, horrific act that will haunt their dreams for the rest of their days.
Joining the swelling ranks of the...
1996
Fiction
A Fine Balance
With a compassionate realism and narrative sweep that recall the work of Charles Dickens, this magnificent novel captures all the cruelty and corruption, dignity and heroism, of India.
The time is 1975. The place is an unnamed city by the sea. The government has just declared a State of Emergency,...
1995
Fiction
The Blue Afternoon
Set across Los Angeles in 1936, The Blue Afternoon follows Kay Fischer, a young architect whose life is disrupted when an older man named Salvador Carriscant appears claiming to be her father. What begins as a personal shock quickly turns into a larger, more unsettling mystery: Carriscant is not...
1994
Fiction
Remembering Babylon
In this rich and compelling novel, written in language of astonishing poise and resonance, one of Australia's greatest living writers gives an immensely powerful vision of human differences and eternal divisions. In the mid-1840s a thirteen-year-old British cabin boy, Gemmy Fairley, is cast ashore...
1993
Fiction
Pigs in Heaven
When six-year-old Turtle Greer witnesses a freak accident at the Hoover Dam, her insistence on what she has seen and her mother's belief in her lead to a man's dramatic rescue. But Turtle's moment of celebrity draws her into a conflict of historic proportions. The crisis quickly envelops not only...
1992
Fiction
Maus II: A Survivor's Tale: And Here My Troubles Began
Maus, Book 2
A brutally moving work of art—widely hailed as the greatest graphic novel ever written—Maus recounts the chilling experiences of the author’s father during the Holocaust, with Jews drawn as wide-eyed mice and Nazis as menacing cats.
Maus is a haunting tale within a tale, weaving the author’s...
1991
Fiction
White People
In eleven glorious stories, Allan Gurganus, author of the highly acclaimed Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, gives heart-breaking and hilarious voice to the fears, desires, and triumphs of Americans—black and white, gay and straight, old and young, Northern and especially Southern.
Here...
1990
Fiction
Lantern Slides
In twelve stories peopled with deeply etched characters, whom we come to know instantly and intimately, Lantern Slides reveals the wit and passion of a master of the short fiction form. Rich and humorous, full of struggle and boldness, these stories are a singular reflection of Edna O'Brien's...
1989
Fiction
The Heart of the Country
When Natalie's husband, Harry, kisses her and their two children goodbye, departs for the office, and never returns, Natalie immediately blames herself. If she hadn't been cheating on her husband every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon, he never would have left her for his secretary, a local beauty...
1988
Fiction
Love in the Time of Cholera
In their youth, Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza fall passionately in love. When Fermina eventually chooses to marry a wealthy, well-born doctor, Florentino is devastated, but he is a romantic. As he rises in his business career he whiles away the years in 622 affairs--yet he reserves his heart for...
1987
Fiction
Fools Crow
The year is 1870, and Fool's Crow, so called after he killed the chief of the Crows during a raid, has a vision at the annual Sun Dance ceremony. The young warrior sees the end of the Indian way of life and the choice that must be made: resistance or humiliating accommodation.
1986
Fiction
The Handmaid's Tale
In Margaret Atwood’s dystopian future, environmental disasters and declining birthrates have led to a Second American Civil War. The result is the rise of the Republic of Gilead, a totalitarian regime that enforces rigid social roles and enslaves the few remaining fertile women.
Offred is one of...
1985
Fiction
Love Medicine
With astonishing virtuosity, each chapter of this stunning novel draws on a range of voices to limn its tales. Black humor mingles with magic, injustice bleeds into betrayal, and through it all, bonds of love and family marry the elements into a tightly woven whole that pulses with the drama of...
1984
Fiction
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, acclaimed author Milan Kundera tells the story of two couples: a young woman in love with a man torn between his love for her and his incorrigible womanizing, and one of his mistresses and her humbly faithful lover. In a world in which lives are shaped by...
1983
Fiction
Schindler's List
Based on a true story, Schindler's List follows Oskar Schindler, an unlikely hero whose transformation unfolds against the backdrop of Nazi-occupied Poland during World War II. A businessman and opportunist at the outset, Schindler arrives in Kraków seeking profit, exploiting the cheap labor of...
1982
Fiction
A Flag for Sunrise
An emotional, dramatic and philosophical novel about Americans drawn into a small Central American country on the brink of revolution.
1981
Fiction
The White Hotel
It is a dream of electrifying eroticism and inexplicable violence, recounted by a young woman to her analyst, Sigmund Freud. It is a horrifying yet restrained narrative of the Holocaust. It is a searing vision of the wounds of the twentieth century, and an attempt to heal them.
Interweaving poetry...
1980
Fiction
The Second Coming
Will Barrett is a lonely widower suffering from a depression so severe that he decides he doesn't want to continue living. But then he meets Allison, a mental hospital escapee making a new life for herself in a greenhouse. The Second Coming is by turns touching and zany, tragic and comic, as Will...