The year in prizes
2007 Book Award Winners
22 prize categories represented, and 2 notable books from our curated collection
Cormac McCarthy won the Pulitzer for The Road. Anne Enright won the Booker for The Gathering, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie won the Women's Prize for Half of a Yellow Sun, and Doris Lessing received the Nobel at eighty seven.
Winners
In prize order. The prize name opens its full list.
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The Road
A man and his young son push a shopping trolley south along a road through an America destroyed by an event the novel never names. Ash covers...
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The Gathering
Liam Hegarty has walked into the sea at Brighton with stones in his pockets. His sister Veronica goes to England to collect the body, and the novel...
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Tree of Smoke
Skip Sands joins the CIA in 1965 a believer: in the war coming in Vietnam, in the agency, and above all in his uncle, Colonel Francis Xavier Sands,...
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Half of a Yellow Sun
The early sixties first: Ugwu, a village boy of thirteen, arrives as houseboy to Odenigbo, a mathematics lecturer at Nsukka whose evenings fill...
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The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Oscar de Leon is an overweight Dominican American teenager in New Jersey who writes fantasy novels, loves role playing games, and cannot get a girl...
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Everyman
Everyman is a short novel, 182 pages, published by Houghton Mifflin in May 2006, and it begins at a graveside: the funeral of its unnamed...
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The Looming Tower
Lawrence Wright builds The Looming Tower around the people whose choices led to September 11 rather than around the attack itself, which the book...
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The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation
Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff argue in The Race Beat that the civil rights movement could not have succeeded without the journalists who covered...
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The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher
Debby Applegate follows Henry Ward Beecher from a childhood as the eighth of Lyman Beecher's thirteen children, brother to Harriet Beecher Stowe,...
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Legacy of Ashes
Legacy of Ashes is a history of the Central Intelligence Agency from its founding in 1947 to the wreckage of the Iraq intelligence failures, and...
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Imperial Life in the Emerald City
The Emerald City was the Green Zone: four square miles of Baghdad walled off behind blast barriers after the 2003 invasion, where the Coalition...
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Stumbling on Happiness
Gilbert's subject is the human specialty nobody else in the animal kingdom shares: we spend our lives imagining our futures, and we are...
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Native Guard
Native Guard weaves a personal elegy for Natasha Trethewey's murdered mother together with the buried history of the Louisiana Native Guards, an...
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The Drowned Book
The Drowned Book is soaked through: its poems move among rivers, rain, canals, culverts, flooded cellars, and the underworld those waters have...
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Rainbows End
Robert Gu was a celebrated and thoroughly unpleasant poet who lost his mind to Alzheimer's disease. Medicine catches up, his mind is returned to...
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The Yiddish Policemen's Union
The premise is a single change to history. In 1940 the United States opens Alaska to Jewish refugees, so the destroyed millions instead arrive in...
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The Missing
Corpus Christi, Maine, is the town that made it: white collar, complacent, quietly cruel in the way of comfortable places, and downwind of Bedford,...
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Soldier of Sidon
Soldier of Sidon is the third of Gene Wolfe's novels about Latro, after Soldier of the Mist (1986) and Soldier of Arete (1989). Latro is a...
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The Janissary Tree
Istanbul, 1836: the Ottoman Empire is ten years past the Auspicious Incident, the day the sultan turned his artillery on his own Janissaries, the...
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The Higher Power of Lucky
Ten year old Lucky Trimble lives in Hard Pan, California, population forty three, in a trailer she shares with Brigitte, her father's French first...
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Flotsam
A boy at the beach finds an old fashioned camera washed up in the surf and, once he gets the film developed, discovers it holds photographs of an...
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The Golden Notebook
Anna Wulf is a writer living in London, and rather than keep one diary she keeps four, each one holding a different, deliberately separated part of...
What Shaped 2007
Lessing was the oldest laureate the literature prize has had, and she was photographed hearing the news on her doorstep after a shopping trip, responding with an exasperation that delighted everyone. McCarthy's The Road, a father and son walking through a burned country, became the rare postapocalyptic novel to win a major literary prize and was chosen by Oprah's book club the same year. Adichie's novel of the Biafran war made her a defining voice of a new African generation.
Published in 2007, never won a Pulitzer or Booker
These come from our Never Won a Pulitzer or Booker collection, which explains which prizes we count and the retrospective exception for Fahrenheit 451.
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Curated selectionA Thousand Splendid Suns
Mariam grows up outside Herat, the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy businessman, Jalil, who visits her and her embittered mother Nana only...
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Curated selectionThe Reluctant Fundamentalist
Over a single evening in a Lahore cafe, a bearded Pakistani man named Changez tells an unnamed, visibly nervous American stranger the story of his...