Our National Book Award Winners

Nonfiction 2024

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.

Young People’s Literature 2024

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.

Fiction 2022

Set over one sweltering week in July and culminating in a bizarre act of violence that finally changes everything, The Rabbit Hutch is a savagely beautiful and bitingly funny snapshot of contemporary America, a gorgeous and provocative tale of loneliness and longing, entrapment and, ultimately, freedom.

Translated Literature 2022

The seven houses in these seven stories are strange. A person is missing, or a truth, or memory; some rooms are enticing, some unmoored, others empty. In each story, twists and turns will unnerve and surprise: Schweblin never takes the expected path and instead digs under the skin, revealing surreal truths about our sense of home, of belonging, and of the fragility of our connections with others.

Young People’s Literature 2022

A brilliant, unforgettable, and heart-wrenching contemporary novel about family and forgiveness, love and loss, in a sweeping story that crosses generations and continents.

Fiction 2021

An astounding work of fiction from Jason Mott, always deeply honest, at times electrically funny, that goes to the heart of racism, police violence, and the hidden costs exacted upon Black Americans, and America as a whole.

Young People’s Literature 2021

But America in 1954 is not a safe place for two girls to fall in love, especially not in Chinatown. Red-Scare paranoia threatens everyone, including Chinese Americans like Lily. With deportation looming over her father—despite his hard-won citizenship—Lily and Kath risk everything to let their love see the light of day.

Nonfiction 2021

A renowned historian traces the life of a single object handed down through three generations of Black women to craft an extraordinary testament to people who are left out of the archives.

Fiction 2020

“A shattering and darkly comic send-up of racial stereotyping in Hollywood” (Vanity Fair) and a deeply personal novel about race, pop culture, immigration, assimilation, and escaping the roles we are forced to play.

Translated Literature 2020

A surreal, devastating story of a homeless ghost who haunts one of Tokyo’s busiest train stations. A powerful masterwork from one of Japan’s most brilliant outsider writers, Tokyo Ueno Station is a book for our times and a look into a marginalized existence in a shiny global megapolis.

Fiction 2018

The New York Times bestselling story of love, friendship, grief, healing, and the magical bond between a woman and her dog.

Nonfiction 2017

The essential journalist and bestselling biographer of Vladimir Putin reveals how, in the space of a generation, Russia surrendered to a more virulent and invincible new strain of autocracy.

Fiction 2016

“An American masterpiece” (NPR) that chronicles a young slave’s adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South. As Whitehead brilliantly re-creates the terrors of the antebellum era, he weaves in the saga of our nation, from the brutal abduction of Africans to the unfulfilled promises of the present day.

Young People’s Literature 2016

Welcome to the stunning conclusion of the award-winning and bestselling March trilogy. Congressman John Lewis, an American icon and one of the key figures of the civil rights movement, joins co-writer Andrew Aydin and artist Nate Powell to bring the lessons of history to vivid life for a new generation, urgently relevant for today’s world.

Fiction 2015

The National Book Award–winning story collection from the author of The Orphan Master’s Son offers something rare in fiction: A new way of looking at the world. Throughout these six stories, Pulitzer Prize winner Adam Johnson delves deep into love and loss, natural disasters, the influence of technology, and how the political shapes the personal, giving voice to the perspectives we don’t often hear.

Nonfiction 2015

Hailed by Toni Morrison as “required reading,” a bold and personal literary exploration of America’s racial history by “the most important essayist in a generation and a writer who changed the national political conversation about race” (Rolling Stone).

Poetry 2015

This National Book Award-winning debut poetry collection is a “powerfully evocative” (The New York Review of Books) meditation on the black female figure through time. Lewis’s book is a thrilling aesthetic anthem to the complexity of race — a full embrace of its pleasure and horror, in equal parts.

Fiction 2014

Phil Klay’s Redeployment takes readers to the frontlines of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, asking us to understand what happened there, and what happened to the soldiers who returned. Interwoven with themes of brutality and faith, guilt and fear, helplessness and survival, the characters in these stories struggle to make meaning out of chaos.

Young People’s Literature 2014

Raised in South Carolina and New York, Woodson always felt halfway home in each place. In vivid poems, she shares what it was like to grow up as an African American in the 1960s and 1970s, living with the remnants of Jim Crow and her growing awareness of the Civil Rights movement. Touching and powerful, each poem is both accessible and emotionally charged, each line a glimpse into a child’s soul as she searches for her place in the world.

Fiction 2013

From the bestselling author of The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, Deacon King Kong (an Oprah Book Club pick) and The Color of Water comes the story of a young boy born a slave who joins John Brown’s antislavery crusade — and who must pass as a girl to survive.

Nonfiction 2012

In this breathtaking book by Pulitzer Prize winner Katherine Boo, a bewildering age of global change and inequality is made human through the dramatic story of families striving toward a better life in Annawadi, a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport. With intelligence, humor, and deep insight into what connects people to one another in an era of tumultuous change, Behind the Beautiful Forevers carries the reader headlong into one of the twenty-first century’s hidden worlds — and into the hearts of families impossible to forget.

Poetry 2010

In his fourth collection, Terrance Hayes investigates how we construct experience. With one foot firmly grounded in the everyday and the other hovering in the air, his poems braid dream and reality into a poetry that is both dark and buoyant. Fueled by an imagination that enlightens, delights, and ignites, Lighthead leaves us illuminated and scorched.

Young People’s Literature 2010

Caitlin has Asperger’s. The world according to her is black and white; anything in between is confusing. Before, when things got confusing, Caitlin went to her older brother, Devon, for help. But Devon was killed in a school shooting. Caitlin wants everything to go back to the way things were, but she doesn’t know how to do that. Then she comes across the word closure – and she realizes this is what she needs. And in her search for it, Caitlin discovers that the world may not be so black and white after all.

Fiction 2009

In the dawning light of a late-summer morning, the people of lower Manhattan stand hushed, staring up in disbelief at the Twin Towers. It is August 1974, and a mysterious tightrope walker is running, dancing, leaping between the towers, suspended a quarter mile above the ground. In the streets below, a slew of ordinary lives become extraordinary in bestselling novelist Colum McCann’s stunningly intricate portrait of a city and its people.

Nonfiction 2009

In this groundbreaking biography, T.J. Stiles tells the dramatic story of Cornelius “Commodore” Vanderbilt, the combative man and American icon who, through his genius and force of will, did more than perhaps any other individual to create modern capitalism.

Nonfiction 2007

With shocking revelations that made headlines in papers across the country, Pulitzer Prize-winner Tim Weiner gets at the truth behind the CIA and uncovers here why nearly every CIA Director has left the agency in worse shape than when he found it; and how these profound failures jeopardize our national security.

Fiction 2005

A daring literary masterpiece of historical fiction that weaves together the gripping stories of those caught in the web of authoritarian rule.

Nonfiction 2005

From one of America’s iconic writers, a stunning book of electric honesty and passion that explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: A portrait of a marriage — and a life, in good times and bad — that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child.

Young People’s Literature 2005

This summer the Penderwick sisters have a wonderful surprise: A holiday on the grounds of a beautiful estate called Arundel. Soon they are busy discovering the summertime magic of Arundel’s sprawling gardens, treasure-filled attic, tame rabbits, and the cook who makes the best gingerbread in Massachusetts. But the best discovery of all is Jeffrey Tifton, son of Arundel’s owner, who quickly proves to be the perfect companion for their adventures.

Fiction 2002

An astonishing novel that traces the lives of a Scottish family over a decade as they confront the joys and longings, fulfillments and betrayals of love in all its guises.

Nonfiction 2002

Master of the Senate, book three of The Years of Lyndon Johnson, carries Johnson’s story through one of its most remarkable periods: His twelve years, from 1949 to 1960, in the United States Senate.

Nonfiction 2000

From the author of Mayflower, Valiant Ambition, and In the Hurricane’s Eye – the riveting bestseller tells the story of the true events that inspired Melville’s Moby-Dick.

Fiction 1999

From the widely acclaimed author — a rich and atmospheric novel about a man living in two worlds, struggling with the conflicting claims of two utterly different women.

Nonfiction 1997

Following Thomas Jefferson from the drafting of the Declaration of Independence to his retirement in Monticello, Joseph J. Ellis unravels the contradictions of the Jeffersonian character. American Sphinx is a marvel of scholarship, a delight to read, and an essential gloss on the Jeffersonian legacy.

Nonfiction 1995

The Pulitzer Prize-winning look at the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe.

Nonfiction 1994

Even more relevant than when it was first published, this edition addresses contemporary issues in end-of-life care and includes an all-embracing and incisive afterword that examines the state of health care and our relationship with life as it approaches its terminus. How We Die also discusses how we can take control of our own final days and those of our loved ones.

Fiction 1992

All the Pretty Horses is the tale of John Grady Cole, who at sixteen finds himself at the end of a long line of Texas ranchers, cut off from the only life he has ever imagined for himself. With two companions, he sets off for Mexico on a sometimes idyllic, sometimes comic journey to a place where dreams are paid for in blood.

Fiction 1991

Is love between equals possible? This modern classic is a delightful intellectual love story that explores the deepest canyons of romantic love even as it asks large questions about society, geopolitics, and the mystery of what men and women really want.

Poetry 1991

“Since the early 1960s Philip Levine has articulated in poetry the lives of the men and women who run machines, punch the time clocks, and work the assembly lines . . . What Work Is makes some of its severest poetry out of wounds inflicted on workers and the environments by manufacturing.” —Richard Tillinghast, The New York Times Book Review

Fiction 1989

A classic tale of a man, a boat, and a storm, Spartina is the lyrical and compassionate story of Dick Pierce, a commercial fisherman along the shores of Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay. A kind, sensitive, family man, he is also prone to irascible outbursts against the people he must work for, now that he can no longer make his living from the sea. Moving and poetic, Spartina is a masterly story of one man’s ongoing struggle to find his place in the world.

Nonfiction 1988

One of the most acclaimed books of our time — the definitive Vietnam War exposé and the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

Fiction 1987

Paco Sullivan is the only man in Alpha Company to survive a cataclysmic Viet Cong attack on Fire Base Harriette in Vietnam. He winds up back in the US with his legs full of pins, daily rations of Librium and Valium, and no sense of what to do next. Brilliantly and vividly written, Paco’s Story plunges you into the violence and casual cruelty of the Vietnam War, and the ghostly aftermath that often dealt the harshest blows.

Fiction 1986

A marvelous work from a master storyteller, World’s Fair is a book about a boy who must surrender his innocence to come of age, and a generation that must survive great hardship to reach its future.

Nonfiction 1986

This bestselling, ground-breaking exploration of the Far North is a classic of natural history, anthropology, and travel writing. Written in prose as memorably pure as the land it describes, Arctic Dreams is a timeless mediation on the ability of the landscape to shape our dreams and to haunt our imaginations.

Fiction 1985

An “eerie, brilliant, and touching” (The New York Times) modern classic about mass culture and the numbing effects of technology.

Nonfiction 1985

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, and the American Book Award, the bestselling Common Ground is much more than the story of the busing crisis in Boston as told through the experiences of three families. As Studs Terkel remarked, it’s ”gripping, indelible … a truth about all large American cities.”

Fiction 1984

Richard and Sara Everton, just over and just under forty, have come to the small Mexican village of Ibarra to reopen a copper mine abandoned by Richard’s grandfather fifty years before. They have mortgaged, sold, borrowed, left friends and country, to settle in this remote spot; their plan is to live out their lives here, connected to the place and to each other.

Fiction 1982

The middle-aged hero of Rabbit, Run, returns — from one of the most gifted American writers of the twentieth century.

Fiction 1981

A seminal collection from one of the true masters of the short story. Spanning the duration of Cheever’s long and distinguished career, these sixty-one stories chronicle and encapsulate the lives of what has been called “the greatest generation.”

Nonfiction 1981

The author chronicles the lives of three generations of Chinese men in America, woven from memory, myth and fact. Here’s a storyteller’s tale of what they endured in a strange new land.

Fiction 1980

Three stories are told: A young Southerner wants to become a writer; a turbulent love-hate affair between a brilliant Jew and a beautiful Polish woman; and of an awful wound in that woman’s past – one that impels both Sophie and Nathan toward destruction.

Nonfiction 1980

The talents he nurtured were known worldwide: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, and numerous others. But Maxwell Perkins remained a mystery, a backstage presence who served these authors not only as editor but also as critic, career manager, moneylender, psychoanalyst, father-confessor, and friend. This outstanding biography is the first to explore the fascinating life of this genius editor extraordinare — in both the professional and personal domains.

Fiction 1979

In a blend of reality and fantasy, this novel tells the story of a young soldier who one day lays down his rifle and sets off on a quixotic journey from the jungles of Indochina to the streets of Paris. In its memorable evocation of men both fleeing from and meeting the demands of battle, Going After Cacciato stands as much more than just a great war novel. Ultimately it’s about the forces of fear and heroism that do battle in the hearts of us all.

Fiction 1977

This tour-de-force of American literature and a winner of the National Book Award is a profound, intimate, affecting novel from one of the most esteemed literary minds of the last century and a beloved chronicler of the West.

Poetry  1976

First released in 1975, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror is today regarded as one of the most important collections of poetry published in the last fifty years. These are poems “of breathtaking freshness and adventure in which dazzling orchestrations of language open up whole areas of consciousness no other American poet as ever begun to explore” (The New York Times).

Fiction 1971

Mr. Artur Sammler, Holocaust survivor, intellectual, and occasional lecturer at Columbia University in 1960s New York City, is a “registrar of madness,” a refined and civilized being caught among people crazy with the promises of the future (moon landings, endless possibilities). His Cyclopean gaze reflects on the degradations of city life while looking deep into the sufferings of the human soul. At its heart, this novel is quintessential Bellow: Moral, urbane, sublimely humane.

Fiction 1970

Kurt Vonnegut’s masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five is “a desperate, painfully honest attempt to confront the monstrous crimes of the twentieth century” (Time). More than fifty years after its initial publication at the height of the Vietnam War, Vonnegut’s portrayal of political disillusionment, PTSD, and postwar anxiety feels as relevant, darkly humorous, and profoundly affecting as ever, an enduring beacon through our own era’s uncertainties.

Nonfiction 1969

Fifty years after the March on the Pentagon, Norman Mailer’s seminal tour de force remains as urgent and incisive as ever. Winner of America’s two highest literary awards, The Armies of the Night uniquely and unforgettably captures the Sixties’ tidal wave of love and rage at its crest and a towering genius at his peak.

Nonfiction 1968

In 1964, Jonathan Kozol entered the Boston Public School system to teach fourth grade at one of its most overcrowded inner-city schools. Here, he unflinchingly exposes the disturbing “destruction of hearts and minds in the Boston public school.” Death at an Early Age is the unsparing, heart-wrenching account of the year he spent there — the most shocking and powerful personal story ever told by a young teacher, now updated with a new epilogue by the author.

Nonfiction 1967

The eighteenth century Enlightenment marks the beginning of the modern age when the scientific method and belief in reason and progress came to hold sway over the Western world. In the twentieth century, however, the Enlightenment has often been judged harshly for its apparently simplistic optimism. Here a master historian goes back to the sources to give us both a more sophisticated and intriguing view of the philosophes, their world and their ideas.

Fiction 1965

This is the story of Moses Herzog — a great sufferer, joker, mourner, charmer, serial writer of unsent letters, and a survivor, both of his private disasters and those of the age. Winner of the National Book Award when it was first published in 1964, the novel was hailed as “a masterpiece” (The New York Times Book Review).

Fiction 1964

The Centaur is a modern retelling of the legend of Chiron, the noblest and wisest of the centaurs, who, painfully wounded yet unable to die, gave up his immortality on behalf of Prometheus. In the retelling, Olympus becomes small-town Olinger High School; Chiron is George Caldwell, a science teacher there; and Prometheus is Caldwell’s fifteen-year-old son, Peter. Brilliantly conflating the author’s remembered past with tales from Greek mythology, John Updike translates Chiron’s agonized search for relief into the incidents and accidents of three winter days spent in rural Pennsylvania in 1947.

Fiction 1960

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning writer of explosive wit, merciless insight, and a fierce compassion comes “a masterpiece” (Newsweek) that illuminates the subterranean conflicts between parents and children and friends and neighbors in the American Jewish diaspora.

Fiction 1956

Joe Chapin led a storybook life. A successful small-town lawyer with a beautiful wife, two over-achieving children, and aspirations to be president, he seemed to have it all. But as his daughter looks back on his life, a different man emerges: One in conflict with his ambitious and shrewish wife, terrified that the misdeeds of his children will dash his political dreams, and in love with a model half his age. With black wit and penetrating insight, Ten North Frederick is a brilliant portrait of the personal and political hypocrisy of mid-century America.

Fiction 1955

An allegorical story of World War I, set in the trenches in France and dealing ostensibly with a mutiny in a French regiment, it was originally considered a sharp departure for Faulkner. Recently it has come to be recognized as one of his major works and an essential part of the Faulkner oeuvre.

Fiction 1954

Much of The Adventures of Augie March takes place during the Great Depression, but far from being a chronicle of deprivation, the first of Saul Bellow’s string of masterpieces testifies to the explosive richness of life when it is lived at high risk and in tumultuous social circumstances.

Nonfiction 1954

America’s foremost Civil War historian recounts the final year of the Civil War in his final volume of the Army of the Potomac Trilogy.

Fiction 1953

In this deeply compelling novel and epic milestone of American literature, a nameless narrator tells his story from the basement lair of the Invisible Man he imagines himself to be.

Fiction 1952

1941: Pvt. Robert E. Lee Prewitt is a champion welterweight and a fine bugler. But when he refuses to join the company’s boxing team, he gets “the treatment” that may break him or kill him. First Sgt. Milton Anthony Warden knows how to soldier better than almost anyone, yet he’s risking his career to have an affair with his commanding officer’s wife. Both Warden and Prewitt are bound by a common bond: The Army is their heart and blood—and, possibly, their death.