2005 Book Award Winners

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...

Max Morden, a retired art historian, has gone back to the seaside village where his family took cheap lodgings the summer he was eleven. His wife...

A telephone rings somewhere in the dark between Berlin and Moscow, and an unnamed operator, part narrator, part surveillance apparatus, begins...

Eva Khatchadourian writes letters to her husband Franklin, and the letters are the novel. Their subject is their son Kevin, who two days before his...

Late in 1864 William Tecumseh Sherman took sixty thousand Union troops out of Atlanta and marched them to Savannah and then north through the...

War Trash is Ha Jin's novel of the Korean War, published by Pantheon in October 2004 and written as the memoir of Yu Yuan, an old man visiting his...

Steve Coll traces the CIA's secret involvement in Afghanistan from the Soviet invasion of 1979 through the eve of September 11, 2001, built from...

David Hackett Fischer opens Washington's Crossing with Emanuel Leutze's famous 1851 painting of the scene before turning to what actually happened...

Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan spent roughly ten years writing this life of Willem de Kooning, following him from a working class childhood in...

On the night of December 30, 2003, John Gregory Dunne sat down to dinner in the apartment he shared with Joan Didion, his wife and collaborator of...

B.S. Johnson was a British experimental novelist who believed the conventional novel was a lie, who published a book in loose sections in a box so...

Ball's subject is an old dream renewed: a physics of society. Thomas Hobbes, writing amid civil war, tried to derive government from Galilean first...

Delights & Shadows pays close attention to small Midwestern scenes: aging bodies, the weather, a father's memory, the ordinary furniture of rural...

Rapture is a single love affair told in one long sequence of poems, from the first unbidden thought of the beloved to the last cold survey of what...

English magic died centuries ago and is now a subject for gentlemen scholars who study it and do not practice it. Then Mr Norrell, a small,...

Two immortal shapeshifters have been on Earth for a very long time and do not know about each other. The changeling arrived a million years ago,...

Creepers is the slang for urban explorers, the trespassers who infiltrate sealed buildings to document what time is doing to them, and Morrell's...

A clear warning before anything else, because a recommendation without one would be useless here. This is extreme horror, and it is extreme by the...

English magic died centuries ago and is now a subject for gentlemen scholars who study it and do not practice it. Then Mr Norrell, a small,...

The Becker brothers grow up in Tustin when Orange County is still orange groves, and Parker opens with the 1954 afternoon that fixes everything: a...

Katie Takeshima grows up worshipping her older sister Lynn, who teaches her the Japanese word kira kira, meaning glittering, and uses it as a...

A small, hungry kitten sees the full moon for the very first time and is entirely certain it is a bowl of milk hanging in the sky. She stretches...

Stanley Webber, a former pianist somewhere in his late thirties, has been the only lodger for some time at a rundown seaside boarding house run by...