2016 Book Award Winners

The narrator is a captain in the South Vietnamese secret police, the illegitimate son of a French priest and a Vietnamese teenager, educated in...

The narrator, known as Bonbon, grew up in Dickens, a poor and agricultural corner of Los Angeles, raised by a father who conducted psychological...

Cora is enslaved on a Georgia cotton plantation, an outcast among the other enslaved people because her mother ran and left her. When Caesar, newly...

A woman kills an intruder in her kitchen with a religious ornament, and because she is the mother of the man who runs organized crime in Cork, the...

On an Ojibwe reservation in North Dakota, in the late summer of 1999, Landreaux Iron is hunting a deer at the edge of his neighbor's land when the...

Delicious Foods opens with Eddie, seventeen, driving away from a farm in Louisiana without his hands. He heads north, eventually to St. Cloud,...

Joby Warrick tells the story of the Islamic State primarily through the life of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant whose brutal insurgent...

T. J. Stiles built Custer's Trials as a full biography of George Armstrong Custer, deliberately refusing to let the general's death overshadow the...

This is William Finnegan's own account of a life organized almost entirely around waves, beginning with a childhood split between Los Angeles and...

Stamped from the Beginning is a history of racist ideas in America, and its central claim reverses the story most readers carry: racist ideas,...

Invited to lecture in Lviv, the western Ukrainian city that has been Lemberg, Lwów and Lvov inside a single lifetime, the human rights barrister...

Alexander von Humboldt was, around 1820, the most famous scientist in the world: the Prussian explorer whose name is still on more places, species...

Ozone Journal centers on an extended title sequence of fifty four individual sections, each one working as a poem in itself while also building...

Jackself tells a childhood, but slant: its hero is Jackself, a boy assembled from the Jacks of English folklore and idiom, Jack Frost, Jack...

The world is called the Stillness, which is a joke, because the continent is tectonically murderous and civilization is organized entirely around...

Patricia Delfine talks to a bird when she is six and is told she is a witch. Laurence Armstead builds a two second time machine out of a wristwatch...

Abe lost his wife to cancer two years into the marriage, and fishing is what he did instead of drinking. Dan, younger, lost his wife and both sons...

The Chimes is set in a London that survived the Allbreaking, a catastrophe in which sound itself became a weapon. Now the Order, which rules from...

Roy's Kentucky is lavender country, hills of it, worked by families whose feuds have root systems, and her novel runs on two timelines a generation...

Every Sunday after church, a boy named CJ and his grandmother, Nana, ride the bus across their city to volunteer at a soup kitchen, and this...

In 1914, a Canadian army veterinarian named Harry Colebourn bought an orphaned black bear cub for twenty dollars at a railway station in White...

The Lyrics collects six decades of Bob Dylan's songs as text on the page, stripped of melody and performance and left to stand as writing alone....