1996 Book Award Winners

Frank Bascombe used to write about sports. Now he sells houses in Haddam, New Jersey, and it is the Fourth of July weekend, 1988. He is divorced,...

Four men meet in a Bermondsey pub on an April morning in 1990 and drive to Margate with a plastic jar. Jack Dodds, butcher, has died, and his last...

Seven stories and a novella, all of them about science as a human passion, worked variously across two centuries: Linnaeus in old age, his memory...

Catherine and Rob grow up nearly alone in their grandfather's decaying rural English house in the years before the First World War. Their mother...

Women in Their Beds gathers thirty five stories from four decades of Gina Berriault's work: twenty five drawn from her earlier collections and ten...

Frank Bascombe used to write about sports. Now he sells houses in Haddam, New Jersey, and it is the Fourth of July weekend, 1988. He is divorced,...

When communism fell in 1989, the new democracies of Central Europe inherited a question no revolution escapes: what do you do with the people who...

Alan Taylor reconstructs the founding and early decades of Cooperstown, New York, through the life of William Cooper, the land speculator and judge...

Jack Miles, a former Jesuit seminarian with a doctorate in Near Eastern languages from Harvard, reads the Hebrew Bible as a work of literature and...

An American Requiem is James Carroll's memoir of his father, of his church, and of the war that broke both relationships, and it compresses the...

Karlen's history proposes a simple, unsettling frame: infectious disease is not an interruption of the human story but a running commentary on it,...

The Dream of the Unified Field selects poems from four of Jorie Graham's collections published between 1974 and 1994, tracing a poet steadily...

Subhuman Redneck Poems is Les Murray's angriest and most celebrated collection, sixty six poems that take their title from the sneer he imagined...

Nation states have dissolved. People belong instead to phyles, tribes of shared culture and contract, and the wealthiest is New Atlantis, whose...

Lore van Oesterling wakes naked in an alley in a northern English city with the wounds from a bad kidnapping and no identity she is prepared to...

Cold Mountain Penitentiary in 1932. Paul Edgecombe runs E Block, death row, called the Green Mile for the lime colored linoleum between the cells...

The Prestige opens in the present day. Andrew Westley, a London journalist who was adopted as a small child, has always felt he had a twin brother,...

Sid Halley has taken on aristocrats, syndicates and torturers, and this book hands him the case that costs the most: the evidence, assembled...

A homeless, nameless girl sleeping in a dung heap for warmth is taken in by Jane Sharp, the local midwife in an unnamed medieval English village,...

Officer Buckle gives school safety talks so dull they put every student to sleep, until the police department pairs him with a dog named Gloria,...

View with a Grain of Sand is not a single collection Wisława Szymborska herself assembled. It is a 1995 English language selection, drawn from...