2013 Book Award Winners

Pak Jun Do grows up in a North Korean orphanage his father runs, which technically makes him not an orphan, a distinction nobody else observes. He...

Hokitika, New Zealand, January 1866, at the height of the West Coast gold rush. Walter Moody arrives off a bad crossing and walks into a hotel...

Henry Shackleford is ten or so, enslaved in a Kansas Territory tavern in 1856, when Old John Brown himself blows in, gets Henry's father killed in...

Harold Silver is a mild Nixon scholar, teaching a course nobody takes, married to a woman who barely notices him, and standing in the kitchen at...

Ifemelu and Obinze fall in love as teenagers at secondary school in Lagos under the military dictatorship of the 1990s. Ifemelu leaves for...

Everything Begins & Ends at the Kentucky Club gathers seven stories by Benjamin Alire Sáenz, published in 2012 by Cinco Puntos Press and set on...

Gilbert King reconstructs the 1949 case of the Groveland Boys, four young Black men in Lake County, Florida accused of raping a white woman on...

Fredrik Logevall opens Embers of War at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, where a young Ho Chi Minh petitioned unsuccessfully for Vietnamese self...

Tom Reiss follows Thomas Alexandre Dumas from his 1762 birth in the French colony of Saint Domingue, now Haiti, the son of a French nobleman and...

The Unwinding is George Packer's inner history of America from the late 1970s to the aftermath of the financial crisis, the decades in which, as...

Gabriele D'Annunzio was the most famous writer in Italy, a poet and novelist of genuine gifts, and one of the most preposterous and dangerous men...

On the fourth of July 2012, in a lecture theater at CERN with champagne waiting, physicists announced they had found the Higgs boson, the last...

Stag's Leap is the book Sharon Olds wrote when her husband of thirty years left her for another woman, and it may be the most complete anatomy of a...

Parallax is named for the optical fact that an object appears to shift when the eye observing it moves, and Sinéad Morrissey builds a whole poetics...

Ensign Andrew Dahl is assigned to the Universal Union flagship Intrepid and notices within a fortnight that something is wrong with the place. Away...

Breq is one body walking across an ice planet with a weapon and a grudge. She used to be the Justice of Toren, a troop carrier with a distributed...

Danny Torrance got out of the Overlook Hotel alive at five, and the novel's opening movements answer the question King's readers had asked for...

Alif is only a handle. Its owner is a young hacker, part Arab and part Indian, in the City, the capital of an unnamed emirate on the Persian Gulf,...

Joe Coughlin is a police captain's son who has chosen the other side of the ledger: Boston, the twenties, Prohibition running the city's real...

Ivan is a silverback gorilla who narrates his own story from a cramped glass enclosure at the Exit 8 Big Top Mall and Video Arcade, where he has...

A small fish steals a tiny blue hat off the head of a much larger, sleeping fish and swims away congratulating himself the whole time, narrating in...

Dear Life gathers fourteen stories, most of them set in the small town southwestern Ontario landscape Alice Munro had already spent a career...