2020 Book Award Winners

Elwood Curtis is a serious, hopeful Black teenager in Tallahassee in the early 1960s, raised by his grandmother, who has worn out a record of...

Glasgow in the 1980s, with the pits and the yards closing and Thatcher's government showing no particular interest. Agnes Bain is glamorous, proud,...

Willis Wu lives above the Golden Palace restaurant in a Chinatown SRO and works, in every sense, as Generic Asian Man: background player in Black...

Stratford, 1596. A boy of eleven searches the house and yard for an adult, any adult, because his twin sister Judith has fallen suddenly ill, and...

Stratford, 1596. A boy of eleven searches the house and yard for an adult, any adult, because his twin sister Judith has fallen suddenly ill, and...

It is 1988 in Mexico City, and Luisa is seventeen, a precocious reader of Baudelaire who lives with her parents, both academics, in Colonia Roma...

Greg Grandin traces the idea of the American frontier from the country's founding through the election of Donald Trump, arguing that the frontier...

Anne Boyer was a single mother living paycheck to paycheck, a week past her forty first birthday, when she was diagnosed with aggressive triple...

W. Caleb McDaniel tells the story of Henrietta Wood, a woman born into slavery in Kentucky around 1819 who was freed, kidnapped back into bondage...

Benjamin Moser follows Susan Sontag from a childhood scattered across the American West after her father's early death, through a University of...

Les Payne, a Pulitzer winning investigative reporter and Newsday editor, spent nearly thirty years interviewing everyone still alive who had known...

There are hundreds of Beatles books, and Craig Brown's wager is that the only honest form left is the kaleidoscope: one hundred and fifty odd short...

Pang was diagnosed autistic at eight, and at five had asked her mother whether there was an instruction manual for humans, a manual for the species...

The Tradition confronts anti Black violence, queer desire, illness, and inherited trauma directly, insisting throughout that tenderness itself can...

A short book with a single situation running through it. An immigrant guest is taken in by a citizen host. The host is generous, liberal, pleased...

Mahit Dzmare arrives in the capital of the Teixcalaanli Empire as ambassador from Lsel Station, a mining habitat of thirty thousand people that has...

Murderbot is a security construct, part cloned tissue and part machine, that hacked its own governor module years ago and could kill everyone in...

Ten years ago, four young Blackfeet men drove into the section of the reservation reserved for the elders and shot into a winter elk herd, and one...

Queen of the Conquered is set in Hans Lollik, an archipelago much like the Caribbean, conquered centuries ago by the pale Fjern, who hold its Black...

Clare Cassidy teaches English at Talgarth High, a comprehensive school whose Victorian wing was the home of R. M. Holland, a minor gothic writer...

Jordan Banks would rather draw comics than do almost anything else, but his parents enroll him at Riverdale Academy Day School, a prestigious,...

Kwame Alexander's poem moves across generations of Black American history in short, propulsive lines, naming both the horrors the country...

The Wild Iris is built around a single New England garden and moves through a full growing season, spring to the end of summer, in poems voiced by...