2008 Book Award Winners

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...

Balram Halwai writes seven letters to the Premier of China, who is shortly to visit Bangalore, because he feels the Premier should hear about...

On an October evening in 1910, in the aftermath of a hurricane, the men of Chokoloskee Island, Florida stand on the shore with their guns and wait...

Lev is in his forties, newly widowed, from Auror, a village in an unnamed Eastern European country where the sawmill has closed and nothing is...

Four European literary critics, obsessed with a reclusive and possibly mythical German novelist named Benno von Archimboldi, follow rumors of his...

The Great Man is Kate Christensen's fourth novel, published by Doubleday in August 2007. Its title belongs to Oscar Feldman, a New York painter...

The Years of Extermination covers the Holocaust from the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 to its end in 1945, the second half of Saul...

Daniel Walker Howe's What Hath God Wrought follows the United States through the three decades after the War of 1812, a period Howe deliberately...

John Matteson's debut book tells the intertwined lives of Louisa May Alcott and her father, the transcendentalist philosopher and reformer Amos...

The Hemingses of Monticello does something no book about slavery had done at this scale: it takes a single enslaved family and gives it the full...

On a June night in 1860, inside a locked and respectable Wiltshire country house, three year old Saville Kent was taken from his cot, and found the...

Lynas's design is the simplest and most effective in climate writing: one chapter per degree. Take the range of warming the models offered for this...

Failure is Philip Schultz's sixth collection, published by Harcourt in 2007: thirty poems in 106 pages, most of them short, followed by one long...

Time and Materials gathers lyric observation, political reflection, and ecological attention into a wide ranging meditation on what time makes and...

Nigh-No-Place was written between two enormous silences, the Canadian interior and the Shetland Islands, and it made Jen Hadfield, at thirty, the...

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...

Gavir is a slave in the city state of Etra, which is modeled closely on the Roman Republic: a household of educated slaves, treated well by their...

Edgar Freemantle, a Minneapolis construction millionaire, is crushed by a crane on one of his own sites: he loses his right arm, part of his memory...

Ysabel is a contemporary fantasy, a departure for Guy Gavriel Kay, and its hero is a teenager. Ned Marriner, fifteen and Canadian, is spending six...

Adam Chase left Rowan County, North Carolina, with an acquittal instead of an absolution: tried for the death of a local boy and acquitted even...

Laura Amy Schlitz built this collection of monologues for the fifth graders she taught as a school librarian, and it keeps that classroom origin...

Twelve year old Hugo Cabret lives secretly inside the walls of a Paris train station in the 1930s, keeping its clocks running after his father's...

J. M. G. Le Clézio tells two stories that never directly meet but keep answering each other across the length of the novel. The first follows a boy...