National Book Award Winners

Author

Notes

2022 Winner

Description

"A debut novel about an odd assortment of residents living in a crumbling apartment building in the post-industrial Midwest."--

2) Hell of a book: or the altogether factual, Wholly Bona Fide story of a big dreams, hard luck, American-Made Mad Kid

Author

Mott, Jason

Notes

2021 Winner

Description

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In Jason Mott's Hell of a Book, a Black author sets out on a cross-country publicity tour to promote his bestselling novel. That storyline drives Hell of a Book and is the scaffolding of something much larger and urgent: since Mott's novel also tells the story of Soot, a young Black boy living in a rural town in the recent past, and The Kid, a possibly imaginary child who appears to the author on his tour. As these characters' stories build and build...

3) Interior Chinatown

Author

Yu, Charles

Notes

2020 Winner

Formats:

Book, eAudiobook

Description

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"From the infinitely inventive author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe comes a deeply personal novel about race, pop culture, assimilation, and escaping the roles we are forced to play."-- Every day Willis Wu leaves his tiny room in a Chinatown SRO and enters the Golden Palace restaurant, where Black and White, a procedural cop show, is in perpetual production. He's a bit player here too, but he dreams of being Kung Fu Guy--...

4) Trust exercise: a novel

Author

Choi, Susan

Notes

2019 Winner

Formats:

Book, eAudiobook

Description

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In an American suburb in the early 1980s, students at a highly competitive performing arts high school struggle and thrive in a rarified bubble, ambitiously pursuing music, movement, Shakespeare, and, particularly, their acting classes. When within this striving “Brotherhood of the Arts,” two freshmen, David and Sarah, fall headlong into love, their passion does not go unnoticed―or untoyed with―by anyone, especially not by their charismatic...

5) The friend

Author

Nunez, Sigrid

Notes

2018 Winner

Formats:

Book, eBook, Kindle

Description

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When a woman unexpectedly loses her lifelong best friend and mentor, she finds herself burdened with the unwanted dog he has left behind. Her own battle against grief is intensified by the mute suffering of the dog, a huge Great Dane traumatized by the inexplicable disappearance of its master, and by the threat of eviction: dogs are prohibited in her apartment building. While others worry that grief has made her a victim of magical thinking, the woman...

6) Sing, unburied, sing: a novel

Author

Ward, Jesmyn

Series

Wheeler Publishing large print hardcover

Notes

2017 Winner

Formats:

Book, eAudiobook, Large Print

Description

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"A searing and profound Southern odyssey by National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward. In Jesmyn Ward's first novel since her National Book Award-winning Salvage the Bones, this singular American writer brings the archetypal road novel into rural twenty-first-century America. Drawing on Morrison and Faulkner, The Odyssey and the Old Testament, Ward gives us an epochal story, a journey through Mississippi's past and present that is both an intimate portrait...

7) The Underground Railroad: a novel

Author

Whitehead, Colson

Notes

2016 Winner

Formats:

Book, Audiobook CD, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle, Large Print

Description

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A magnificent tour de force chronicling a young slave's adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South. Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted. Their first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially...

8) Fortune smiles: stories

Author

Johnson, Adam

Notes

2015 Winner

Formats:

Book, eBook

Description

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"Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his acclaimed and bestselling novel The Orphan Master's Son, Adam Johnson is one of America's most provocative and powerful authors. In Fortune Smiles--his first book since Orphan Master--he continues to give voice to characters rarely heard from, while offering something we all seek from fiction: a new way of looking at our world. In six masterly stories, Johnson delves deep into love and loss, natural disasters,...

9) Redeployment

Author

Klay, Phil

Notes

2014 Winner

Formats:

Book, eAudiobook, eBook, Kindle

Description

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"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. In "Redeployment", a soldier who has had to shoot dogs because they were eating human corpses must learn...

10) The good lord bird

Author

McBride, James

Series

Thorndike Press large print historical fiction

Notes

2013 Winner

Formats:

Book, Audiobook CD, Large Print

Description

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Henry Shackleford is a young slave living in the Kansas Territory in 1857, when the region is a battleground between anti- and pro-slavery forces. When John Brown, the legendary abolitionist, arrives in the area, an argument between Brown and Henry's master quickly turns violent. Henry is forced to leave town-with Brown, who believes he's a girl. Over the ensuing months, Henry-whom Brown nicknames Little Onion-conceals his true identity as he struggles...

11) The round house

Author

Erdrich, Louise

Notes

2012 Winner

Formats:

Book, Audiobook CD, Large Print

Description

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One Sunday in the spring of 1988, a woman living on a reservation in North Dakota is attacked. The details of the crime are slow to surface as Geraldine Coutts is traumatized and reluctant to relive or reveal what happened, either to the police or to her husband, Bazil, and thirteen-year-old son, Joe. In one day, Joe's life is irrevocably transformed. He tries to heal his mother, but she will not leave her bed and slips into an abyss of solitude....

12) Salvage the bones: a novel

Author

Ward, Jesmyn

Series

Wheeler large print hardcover

Notes

2011 Winner

Formats:

Book, eBook, Kindle, Large Print

Description

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Enduring a hardscrabble existence as the children of alcoholic and absent parents, four siblings from a coastal Mississippi town prepare their meager stores for the arrival of Hurricane Katrina while struggling with such challenges as a teen pregnancy and a dying litter of prize pups.

13) Lord of misrule: a novel

Author

Gordon, Jaimy

Notes

2010 Winner

Description

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In the early 1970s, trainer Tommy Hansel attempts a horse racing scam at a small, backwoods track in West Virginia, but nothing goes according to his plan when the horses refuse to cooperate and nearly everyone at the track seems to know his scheme.

14) Let the great world spin: a novel

Author

McCann, Colum

Notes

2009

Formats:

Book, eBook, Kindle, Large Print

Description

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A rich vision of the pain, loveliness, mystery, and promise of New York City in the 1970s. A radical young Irish monk struggles with his own demons as he lives among the prostitutes in the middle of the burning Bronx. A group of mothers gather in a Park Avenue apartment to mourn their sons who died in Vietnam, only to discover just how much divides them even in grief. A young artist finds herself at the scene of a hit-and-run that sends her own life...

15) Shadow Country

Author

Matthiessen, Peter

Series

Shadow Country Trilogy

Notes

2008 Winner

Description

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Shadow Country is Peter Matthiessen's reimagining of the legend of E. J. Watson, the Everglades sugarcane planter and notorious outlaw of the wild Florida frontier. Vividly capturing the American hinterlands at the turn of the twentieth century, it traces the story of Watson through eyewitness perspectives as he drives himself relentlessly toward his own violent end at the hands of neighbors who mostly admired him.

Shadow Country traverses

...

16) Tree of smoke

Author

Johnson, Denis

Notes

2007 Winner

Description

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Once upon a time there was a war . . . and a young American who thought of himself as the Quiet American and the Ugly American, and who wished to be neither, who wanted instead to be the Wise American, or the Good American, but who eventually came to witness himself as the Real American and finally as simply the Fucking American. That's me. This is the story of Skip Sands-spy-in-training, engaged in Psychological Operations against the Vietcong-and...

17) The echo maker

Author

Powers, Richard

Notes

2006 Winner

Formats:

Book, eAudiobook

Description

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On a winter night on a remote Nebraska road, twenty-seven year old Mark Schluter flips his truck in a near fatal accident. His older sister, Karin, returns to nurse Mark back from a traumatic head injury. But when he emerges from a coma, Mark believes that this woman is really an impostor who looks just like his sister. Shattered, Karin contacts the cognitive neurologist Gerald Weber, who eagerly investigates. What he discovers in Mark slowly undermines

...

18) Europe central

Author

Vollmann, William T

Notes

2005 Winner

Description

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In this magnificent work of fiction, William T. Vollmann turns his trenchant eye to the authoritarian cultures of Germany and the USSR in the twentieth century. Assembling a composite portrait of these two warring leviathans and the terrible age they defined, the narrative intertwines experiences both real and fictional: a young German who joins the SS to expose its crimes, two generals who collaborate with the enemy for different reasons, the Soviet...

19) The great fire

Author

Hazzard, Shirley

Notes

2003 Winner

Description

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The Great Fire is an extraordinary love story set in the immediate aftermath of the great conflagration of the Second World War. In war-torn Asia and stricken Europe, men and women, still young but veterans of harsh experience, must reinvent their lives and expectations, and learn, from their past, to dream again. Some will fulfill their destinies, others will falter. At the center of the story, a brave and brilliant soldier finds that survival and...

20) Three Junes

Author

Glass, Julia

Notes

2002 Winner

Formats:

Book, Large Print

Description

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In June of 1989 Paul McLeod, a newspaper publisher and recent widower, travels to Greece, where he falls for a young American artist and reflects on the complicated truth about his marriage. Six years later, again in June, Paul's death draws his three grown sons and their families back to their ancestral home. Fenno, the eldest, a wry, introspective gay man, narrates the events of this unforeseen reunion. Far from his straitlaced expatriate life as...