The Notable and Award-Winning Books of the Year

Winner of the National Book Award for Nonfiction

An intense, intimate and first-of-its-kind look at the world of human smuggling in Latin America, by a MacArthur “genius” grant winner and anthropologist with unprecedented access. In a powerful, original voice, De León expertly chronicles the lives of low-level foot soldiers breaking into the smuggling game, and morally conflicted gang leaders who oversee rag-tag crews of guides and informants along the migrant trail.

Winner of the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature

This heartfelt coming-of-age novel in verse tells the powerful story of a seventh-grade Syrian American boy and his struggles, big and small, as he navigates middle school.

Winner of the Edgar Award

Vera Wong is a lonely little old lady who lives above her forgotten tea shop in the middle of San Francisco’s Chinatown. Then one morning, Vera trudges downstairs to find a curious thing — a dead man in the middle of her tea shop. This lonely shopkeeper takes it upon herself to solve a murder in the most peculiar way in this captivating mystery by Jesse Q. Sutanto.

Winner of the Mary Higgins Clark Award

A cynical tarot card reader seeks to uncover the truth about her friend’s mysterious death in this delightfully clever whodunit, “a delicious blend of suspense and madcap humor” (Library Journal, starred review).

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Memoir or Biography | National Book Award Finalist

“A searing account of grief and the quest to bring her sister’s murderer to justice years after the fact” (The Boston Globe), from “one of Mexico’s greatest living writers” (Jonathan Lethem).

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction

From one of our most accomplished novelists, a mesmerizing story about a mother and daughter seeking refuge in the chaotic aftermath of the Civil War — and a brilliant portrait of family endurance against all odds.

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award

With her distinctive, irresistible wordplay and singular wry humor and wisdom, Lorrie Moore has given us a magic box of longing and surprise as she writes about love and rebirth and the pull towards life. Bold, meditative, theatrical, this new novel is an inventive, poetic portrait of lovers and siblings as it questions the stories we have been told which may or may not be true.

Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize

A wild, sweeping novel that imagines an alternate secret history of Korea and the traces it leaves on the present — loaded with assassins and mad poets, RPGs and slasher films, pop bands and the perils of social media. Same Bed Different Dreams weaves together three distinct narrative voices with an archive of mysterious images, and twists reality like a kaleidoscope. Korean history, American pop culture, and our tech-fraught lives come together in this extraordinary and unforgettable novel.

Winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction

The ghost of Kai, the love of Cam’s life, won’t leave Cam alone. He follows Cam from LA back home to Houston, his visits wild, tender, and unpredictable. But Cam has changed, and when he reenters the orbit of his childhood best friend TJ and his family’s bakery, neither Cam nor TJ is sure how to navigate their charged estrangement. Searching for a way past all the wounds and secrets — a way to be okay together, maybe for the first time — the pair find hope and sustenance from the most unlikely source.

Winner of the Lambda Literary Award in Bisexual Fiction

Our narrator produces a sound from the piano no one else at the Conservatory can. She employs a technique she learned from her parents — also talented musicians — who fled China in the wake of the Cultural Revolution. But when an accident leaves her parents debilitated, she abandons her future for a job at a high-end beauty and wellness store in New York City. Holistik is known for its remarkable products and procedures, and her new job affords her entry into a world of privilege, where she is plied with products that slim her thighs, smooth her skin, and lighten her hair. But beneath these creams and tinctures lies something sinister.

Winner of the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction | Winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction

Set during the early years of Sri Lanka’s three-decade civil war, Brotherless Night is a heartrending portrait of one woman’s moral journey and a testament to both the enduring impact of war and the bonds of home.

Winner of the John Newbery Medal

An enthralling novel for all ages by award-winning author Dave Eggers, told from the perspective of one uniquely endearing dog — featuring beautiful color artwork with illustrations by Caldecott honoree Shawn Harris.

Winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize

By way of H. G. Wells and Rebecca West’s affair through 1930s nuclear physics to Flanagan’s father working as a slave laborer near Hiroshima when the atom bomb is dropped, this daisy chain of events reaches fission when Flanagan as a young man finds himself trapped in a rapid on a wild river not knowing if he is to live or to die. At once a love song to his island home and to his parents, this hypnotic melding of dream, history, place and memory is about how our lives so often arise out of the stories of others and the stories we invent about ourselves.

Winner of the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction

One evening, as a young boy growing up in Benghazi, Khaled hears a bizarre short story read aloud on the radio, about a man being eaten alive by a cat, and has the sense that his life has been changed forever. Obsessed by the power of those words — and by their enigmatic author, Hosam Zowa — Khaled eventually embarks on a journey that will take him far from home, to pursue a life of the mind at the University of Edinburgh. A devastating meditation on friendship and family, and the ways in which time tests — and frays — those bonds, My Friends is an achingly beautiful work of literature by an author working at the peak of his powers.

Winner of the Giller Prize

1920. John has returned from war to North Yorkshire. He is alive but still not whole. Reunited with Helena, an artist, he reopens his photography business and tries to keep on living. But the past erupts insistently into the present, as ghosts begin to surface in his pictures: ghosts with messages he cannot understand. So begins a narrative that spans four generations of connections and consequences that ignite and reignite as the century unfolds. In radiant moments of desire, comprehension, longing, and transcendence, the sparks fly upward, working their transformations decades later.