2004 Book Award Winners

Henry Townsend is a Black farmer and bootmaker in Manchester County, Virginia, in the years before the Civil War. He was born enslaved. His father...

Nick Guest, twenty and just down from Oxford, moves into the attic of a house in Notting Hill belonging to the family of his college friend Toby...

Paris, 1854: Francisco Solano López, the stout, vain son of Paraguay's dictator, on a European shopping tour for uniforms and ideas, sees a red...

London, 1948, and four narrators take turns. Hortense has sailed from Jamaica with her teaching certificates, her gloves and her exact BBC diction,...

It is 1956 and the Reverend John Ames, seventy six years old and dying of a bad heart, is writing a letter to his seven year old son. The boy will...

The Early Stories: 1953–1975 gathers 103 of John Updike's stories, almost all the short fiction he wrote from 1953 to 1975, from his early twenties...

Anne Applebaum tells the history of the Soviet Gulag, the vast system of forced labor camps that held millions of prisoners from the early years of...

Steven Hahn's A Nation Under Our Feet follows Black political life in the rural South across six decades, from slavery through Reconstruction and...

William Taubman follows Nikita Khrushchev from a peasant childhood in the Russian village of Kalinovka, where his father worked in the Donbas coal...

In September 1925, a Black physician named Ossian Sweet bought a house on a white block of Detroit and moved in knowing exactly what would come,...

In the mid 1990s Anna Funder, a young Australian working for German television in Berlin, became fascinated by the question her colleagues found...

Bryson's premise disarms on page one: the bestselling travel writer realized he did not know the difference between a proton and a protein, could...

Walking to Martha's Vineyard writes from deep inside addiction, mental illness, and a tentative, hard won spiritual recovery, tracking a mind that...

George Szirtes was eight years old when his family fled Budapest after the crushed uprising of 1956, and Reel is the book in which a lifetime of...

Ista is forty, a dowager royina, and everyone around her believes she is mad. She spent years cursed, watched her husband and her house destroyed...

Ista is forty, a dowager royina, and everyone around her believes she is mad. She spent years cursed, watched her husband and her house destroyed...

Tim Underhill, months after the events that took his nephew, is writing a novel about a woman named Willy Patrick when the emails begin arriving...

Tooth and Claw is a Victorian novel of manners in which every character is a dragon. Jo Walton took her model from Anthony Trollope's Framley...

John Rebus has thrown a mug of tea at his detective chief superintendent, which is how Edinburgh's most insubordinate inspector lands at...

Despereaux Tilling is born the runt of his litter in a castle, a mouse with oversized ears and, most unforgivably to the rest of mouse society, his...

On August 7, 1974, the French high wire artist Philippe Petit walked a cable strung between the still unfinished towers of the World Trade Center,...

Erika Kohut teaches piano at the Vienna Conservatory, is thirty six years old, and still shares a bed with her mother, who has run every part of...