1997 Book Award Winners

Martin Dressler is the son of a cigar shop owner in New York in the 1880s. He is a good boy with an unusual gift for seeing what a business could...

Rahel and Estha are two egg twins, a girl and a boy, growing up in Ayemenem in Kerala in 1969 in a family that owns a pickle factory. Their mother...

A wounded Confederate soldier stands at a hospital window in Raleigh in the last autumn of the war, and decides. Inman has been shot through the...

Jakob Beer is seven when the Nazis come to his Polish village. He hides, hears what happens to his parents, and never learns what happened to his...

The Blue Flower opens amid the confusions of washday in a noble Saxon household in the 1790s, and it never raises its voice above that domestic...

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...

Richard Kluger traces the American cigarette industry across roughly a century, from tobacco's transformation into a mass produced consumer product...

Jack Rakove examines how the United States Constitution was actually written and ratified, from the 1787 convention in Philadelphia through the...

This is Frank McCourt's own account of a childhood spent crossing back and forth between two countries and never having enough of anything. Born in...

American Sphinx is not a full biography of Thomas Jefferson but something more useful, a study of his character, conducted at five revealing...

In 1984, on the west side of Lake Turkana in Kenya, a member of Richard Leakey's team spotted a matchbook sized piece of skull in the lag gravel,...

Alive Together gathers new poems together with a wide selection from Lisel Mueller's earlier books, moving across a career built out of her own...

God's Gift to Women confirmed Don Paterson as the most formidable British poet of his generation, a Dundee jazz guitarist who had come to poetry...

The third and final volume of the Mars trilogy, and it begins where a normal series would end. The second revolution has succeeded, Earth's grip is...

Versailles in 1693. Marie Josephe de la Croix is lady in waiting to a duchess, a gifted amateur composer and mathematician, and entirely dependent...

In 1940 the Nazi government drew up serious plans to deport Europe's Jews to Madagascar. The plan was real, it was studied, and it was abandoned....

Godmother Night begins as a love story. Laurie and Jaqe meet at a dance in college, fall in love and set up a household together, Laurie leaving...

Henry Griswald is an old Cape Cod lawyer drafting his will, the last custodian of the event his town still calls the Chatham School Affair, and...

Mrs. Eva Marie Olinski, a paraplegic sixth grade teacher returning to the classroom after an accident, chooses four unlikely students, Noah, Nadia,...

In Prague in 1580, the city's Jewish community faces a blood libel, the centuries old, false accusation that Jews use Christian blood in religious...

A man calling himself only the Maniac talks his way into a Milan police station by claiming, falsely and repeatedly, to be whatever official the...