1995 The Entertainers/The Rookies

Talk to David Guterson and it'll make you drowsy. Not only is his voice hypnotically soothing, but he'll tell you that for much of the eight years he spent writing his first novel, Snow Falling on Cedars, he rose before 4:30 a.m., wrote for an hour and a half, headed off to teach high school, returned to home-school three of his four children, and retired at midnight. ''I'm fortunate in that I can get by on less sleep than a lot of people,'' says Guterson, 39, whose best-selling Cedars made nobody drowsy. The racially charged courtroom drama won praise for its PaciÞc Northwest atmosphere (Guterson and his wife, Robin, live on Seattle's Bainbridge Island), received the PEN/Faulkner prize, and became a surprise paperback best-seller. Today he's at work on his second novel. ''The plot keeps changing on me. All I know for sure is that [Cedars] was full of salmon fishing and strawberries, and the new book is full of apples.'' Sounds delicious.