The year in prizes
2010 Book Award Winners
22 prize categories represented, and 2 notable books from our curated collection
Paul Harding won the Pulitzer for Tinkers, published by a tiny nonprofit press. Howard Jacobson won the Booker for The Finkler Question, Patti Smith took the National Book Award for Just Kids, and Mario Vargas Llosa received the Nobel.
Winners
In prize order. The prize name opens its full list.
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Tinkers
George Washington Crosby is dying in a hospital bed in his living room, surrounded by his family, and the clocks he repaired for a living are all...
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The Finkler Question
Julian Treslove is a former BBC radio producer of no particular distinction who makes his living as a celebrity lookalike, resembling nobody in...
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Lord of Misrule
Indian Mound Downs is a half mile track in the West Virginia panhandle, the cheapest rung of American racing, where broken down horses run for...
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The Lacuna
Harrison Shepherd is a boy nobody claims: American father in Washington, Mexican mother towing him through her love affairs, an education abandoned...
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A Visit from the Goon Squad
Thirteen chapters, each a self contained story, following a loose constellation of people connected to Bennie Salazar, a record executive who was...
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War Dances
War Dances is a book by Sherman Alexie, published by Grove in October 2009, that refuses to be one thing. It mixes short stories, poems, question...
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The Dead Hand
David E. Hoffman's subject is the last, most dangerous stretch of the nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union, and the...
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Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World
Liaquat Ahamed, a former World Bank investment officer rather than an academic historian, follows the four men who ran the world's leading central...
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The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt
Cornelius Vanderbilt was born on Staten Island while George Washington was president and died in 1877 as the richest man in America. He began with...
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Just Kids
Just Kids is Patti Smith's memoir of her youth with Robert Mapplethorpe, written to keep a promise she made at his deathbed, and it is one of the...
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Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea
The title is from a North Korean children's song, we have nothing to envy in the world, and the book is the quiet, devastating audit of that claim....
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Life Ascending
Lane picks the ten greatest inventions of evolution, greatest measured by consequence, by how they changed the planet, and gives each a chapter...
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Versed
Versed works in compact, fractured poems that pry at consumer language, scientific discourse, and the wary suspicion of a mind thinking under...
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White Egrets
White Egrets is Derek Walcott's great late book, published when the Nobel laureate was eighty, and its presiding spirits are the birds of the...
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The City & the City
Beszel and Ul Qoma are two cities in eastern Europe. They occupy the same ground. Some streets belong entirely to one, some entirely to the other,...
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The Windup Girl
Bangkok, in the twenty third century. The oil is gone, the seas have risen, and the city survives behind levees and pumps kept running by a king's...
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Blackout/All Clear
Historians at Oxford in 2060 travel to the past to observe. Three of them go to the Second World War: Michael to Dover for the Dunkirk evacuation,...
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A Dark Matter
Madison, Wisconsin, 1966: a campus guru named Spencer Mallon, part scholar, part con man, part genuine channel to something, gathers his young...
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The City & the City
Beszel and Ul Qoma are two cities in eastern Europe. They occupy the same ground. Some streets belong entirely to one, some entirely to the other,...
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The Last Child
Johnny Merrimon is thirteen and has stopped being a child in every way but the law's: a year ago his twin sister Alyssa vanished off a Raven County...
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When You Reach Me
Miranda Sinclair is a sixth grader on Manhattan's Upper West Side in the school year 1978 to 1979, and the book opens with her narrating events...
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The Lion & the Mouse
Jerry Pinkney retells Aesop's fable of the lion and the mouse almost entirely without words, setting it on the African Serengeti and stretching a...
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The Feast of the Goat
Urania Cabral returns to Santo Domingo in 1996 after decades away, and Mario Vargas Llosa builds the novel around what brought her back: her dying...
What Shaped 2010
Tinkers had been turned down by every major publisher, came out from Bellevue Literary Press in a first printing of a few thousand, and won the Pulitzer, which remains the great recent argument for small presses. Patti Smith's Just Kids, about her years with Robert Mapplethorpe in New York before either was famous, won the non fiction award and became the model for the artist's memoir. The Deepwater Horizon rig exploded in April and leaked for eighty seven days.
Published in 2010, 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 selectionFreedom
Walter and Patty Berglund build an outwardly ideal liberal life in a gentrifying St Paul, Minnesota, neighborhood, Walter an environmental lawyer,...
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Curated selectionRoom
Jack is five years old, and Room, a locked backyard shed with a skylight, a bed, a wardrobe, and a television, is the entire world he has ever...