| Pulitzer Prize, 2023Women's Prize for Fiction, 2023
| The son of an Appalachian teenager uses his good looks, wit and instincts to survive foster care, child labor, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses in the new novel from the best-selling author of Unsheltered. |
Trust by Hernán Díaz | Pulitzer Prize, 2023
| Told from the perspective of one woman bent on disentangling fact from fiction, this unrivaled novel about money, power, intimacy and perception is centered around the mystery of how the Rask family acquired their immense fortune in 1920s-1930's New York City. |
| National Book Award, 2023
| Out in the desert in a place called the Palace, a young man tends to a dying soul, someone he once knew briefly, but who has haunted the edges of his life. |
The Words That Remain by Stenio Gardel, trans. Bruna Dantas Lobato
| National Book Award, 2023 | A letter has beckoned to Raimundo since he received it over fifty years ago from his youthful passion, Cícero. But having grown up poor in Brazil, Raimundo has been unable to read. As young men, he and Cícero fell in love, only to have Raimundo’s father beat his son when he discovered their affair. Even after Raimundo makes a life for himself in the city, he continues to be haunted by this secret missive from the distant past. Now at age seventy-one, he at last acquires an education and the ability to read the letter.
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Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov, trans. Angela Rodel | International Booker Prize, 2023 | In an apricot-colored building in Zurich, surrounded by curiously planted forget-me-nots, Gaustine has opened the first “clinic for the past,” an institution that offers an inspired treatment for Alzheimer’s sufferers: each floor reproduces a past decade in minute detail, allowing patients to transport themselves back in time to unlock what is left of their fading memories. |
by R.F. Kuang
| British Book Awards, 2023Nebula Awards, 2023Locus Awards, 2023
| A Chinese boy orphaned by cholera and raised in Britain is trained to work at Oxford's prestigious Royal Institute of Translation, the world's center for translation and magic through silver working where he must choose between competing loyalties. |
by Colleen Hoover | British Book Awards, 2023 | Struggling writer Lowen travels to the late bestselling author Verity Crawford's house in order to finish writing her remaining books. When she arrives, she finds Verity's unpublished and unread autobiography filled with secrets. |
| British Book Awards, 2023
| A new novel explores the mysterious connection between a teacher's disappearance and an unsolved code in a children's book. |
by Louise Kennedy
| British Book Awards, 2023
| As tender as it is unflinching, Trespasses is a masterfully executed and intimate portrait of those caught between the warring realms of the personal and political, rooted in a turbulent and brutally imagined moment of history where it's not just what you do that matters, but what you are. |
Dr. No by Percival Everett | PEN America Literary Awards, 2023
| The protagonist of Percival Everett’s puckish new novel is a brilliant professor of mathematics who goes by Wala Kitu. (Wala, he explains, means “nothing” in Tagalog, and Kitu is Swahili for “nothing.”) He is an expert on nothing. That is to say, he is an expert, and his area of study is nothing, and he does nothing about it. This makes him the perfect partner for the aspiring villain John Sill, who wants to break into Fort Knox to steal, well, not gold bars but a shoebox containing nothing. With the help of the brainy and brainwashed astrophysicist-turned-henchwoman Eigen Vector, our professor tries to foil the villain while remaining in his employ. |
| PEN America Literary Awards, 2023Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection
| Set in a Native community in Maine, Night of the Living Rez is a riveting debut collection about what it means to be Penobscot in the twenty-first century and what it means to live, to survive, and to persevere after tragedy. In twelve striking, luminescent stories, author Morgan Talty -- with searing humor, abiding compassion, and deep insight -- breathes life into tales of family and a community as they struggle with a painful past and an uncertain future. |
| PEN America Literary Awards, 2023Hemingway Award for Debut Novel
| Follows the life of Ever Geimausaddle, a young Native American, through the multigenerational perspectives of his family as they face policy corruption, threats of job loss, constant resettlement and the pent up rage of centuries of injustice. |
| Nebula Awards, 2023 | Offered one last job before serving an eternity in hell, a magical detective in Chicago is given three days to track down the White City Vampire and the chance to live out the rest of her life. |
| World Fantasy Awards, 2023
| Lanie, necromancer and daughter of the Royal Assassin and Chief Executioner of Liriat, must settle family debts to save her ancestral home after her parents are murdered. |
| Hugo Awards, 2023
| To save her sister and topple a throne, Marra is offered the tools she needs if she completes three seemingly impossible tasks with the help of a disgraced ex-knight, a reluctant fairy godmother and an enigmatic gravewitch and her fowl familiar. |
| Hugo Awards, 2023
| When Cora decides she needs a different direction, a different fate, a different prophecy, Miss West reluctantly agrees to transfer her to the other school, where things are run very differently by Whitethorn, the Headmaster. She will soon discover that not all doors are welcoming. |
| Locus Awards, 2023
| When COVID-19 sweeps through New York City, Jamie Gray is stuck as a dead-end driver for food delivery apps. That is, until Jamie makes a delivery to an old acquaintance, Tom, who works at what he calls "an animal rights organization." Tom's team needs a last-minute grunt. What Tom doesn't tell Jamie is that the animals his team cares for are not here on Earth. |
| Locus Awards, 2023 | After touring the rural areas of Panga, Sibling Dex (a Tea Monk of some renown) and Mosscap (a robot sent on a quest to determine what humanity really needs) turn their attention to the villages and cities of the little moon they call home. They hope to find the answers they seek, while making new friends, learning new concepts, and experiencing the entropic nature of the universe. Becky Chambers's new series continues to ask: in a world where people have what they want, does having more even matter? |
| Locus Awards, 2023
| Humankind discovers intelligent life in an octopus species with its own language and culture, and sets off a high-stakes global competition to dominate the future. |
| Locus Awards, 2023
| When Alex Easton, a retired soldier, receives word that their childhood friend Madeline Usher is dying, they race to the ancestral home of the Ushers in the remote countryside of Ruritania. |
| Bram Stoker Awards, 2023
| Agreeing to one final job -- hijacking a cartel's cash shipment before it reaches Mexico, hitman Mario, to salvage what's left of his family, travels across the border and back with two other men whose hidden motivations are laid bare alongside nightmarish encounters that defy explanation. |
| Edgar Awards, 2023
| Ansel Packer is scheduled to die in twelve hours. He knows what he’s done, and now awaits execution, the same chilling fate he forced on those girls, years ago. But Ansel doesn’t want to die; he wants to be celebrated, understood. Through a kaleidoscope of women—a mother, a sister, a homicide detective—we learn the story of Ansel’s life. |
| Edgar Awards, 2023
| Trent Powers relocates his family from Anaheim to Arkansas to take over as head coach of the Denton Pirates, a high school football team powered by a volatile but talented running back named Billy Lowe. Billy comes from an extremely troubled home: a trailer park where he is terrorized by his unstable mother's abusive boyfriend. Billy takes out his anger on the field, and it's not long before he crosses a line. Instead of punishing him, though, Trent takes Billy into his home, hoping to protect his star player as the Pirates begin their playoff run. But when Billy's stepfather is found murdered, nothing can stop an explosive chain of violence that could tear the town apart. |
| Romance Novel Awards, 2023Historical Romantic Novel
| Tells the tale of an orphan turned World War II spy turned fashion icon in Paris. |
| Swoon Awards, 2022
| When Viola Carroll was presumed dead at Waterloo she took the opportunity to live, at last, as herself. But freedom does not come without a price, and Viola paid for hers with the loss of her wealth, her title, and her closest companion, Justin de Vere, the Duke of Gracewood. Only when their families reconnect, years after the war, does Viola learn how deep that loss truly was. |
| Swoon Awards, 2022
| Agreeing to a holiday escape to the country, literary agent Nora keeps running into a bookish, hardheaded, arrogant editor she knows from Manhattan, and wishes she didn't, even as she discovers they have more in common than previously thought. |
| Swoon Awards, 2022Paranormal/Urban Fantasy Romance
| As one of the few witches in Britain, Mika Moon knows she has to hide her magic, keep her head down, and stay away from other witches so their powers don't mingle and draw attention. And as an orphan who lost her parents at a young age and was raised by strangers, she's used to being alone and she follows the rules...with one exception: an online account, where she posts videos "pretending" to be a witch. She thinks no one will take it seriously. But someone does. |
| Society of American Historians Prize for Historical Fiction, 2023 | Monterey, 1851. Ever since her husband was killed in a bar fight, Eliza Ripple has been working in a brothel. It seems like a better life, at least at first. The madam, Mrs. Parks, is kind, the men are (relatively) well behaved, and Eliza has attained what few women have: financial security. But when the dead bodies of young women start appearing outside of town, a darkness descends that she can't resist confronting. |
| David J. Langum Sr. Prize, 2022 | After America's entry into WWII, Maria Lagana, an associate producer at Mercury Pictures, rises through a maze of conflicting politics, divided loyalties and jockeying positions until a man from her imprisoned father's past threatens her carefully constructed facade. |
| Agatha Awards, 2023
| It's spring and Three Pines is reemerging after the harsh winter, but not everything buried should come alive again, not everything lying dormant should reemerge. But something has... |
| Agatha Awards, 2023 | The small town of Yarrow Glen is Willa's fresh start, and she's determined to make it a success – starting with a visit from the local food critic. What Willa didn’t know is that this guy never gives a good review, and when he shows up nothing goes according to plan. She doesn’t think the night can get any worse... until she finds the critic’s dead body, stabbed with one of her shop’s cheese knives. |
| Stonewall Awards, 2023Barbara Gittings Literature Award
| While attending Brown, Jenry, a musical prodigy, sets out to learn about his late father until his estranged grandfather makes an admission that leads Jenry down a new path--one that ends a web of secrecy that binds this family together even as it keeps them apart. |
| Lambda Awards, 2023
| A collection of short stories that include tales about ghost cousins who haunt their living family members, a mother-in-law who bullies her son's wife into leaving, and two girls who make out in the belly of a plastic shark. |
| Lambda Awards, 2023
| Breaking his promise to protect Hussam, with whom he fell in love as they coped with a shared traumatic experience and devastating separation in Syria, Wassim must come to terms with the past as they both realize the secret that haunts them is not the only secret that formed them. |
| Lambda Awards, 2023
| Reluctant Immortals is a historical horror novel that looks at two men of classic literature, Dracula and Mr. Rochester, and the two women who survived them, Bertha and Lucy, who are now undead immortals residing in Los Angeles in 1967 when Dracula and Rochester make a shocking return in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. |
| Lambda Awards, 2023 | "Anvi, Kate, Bette, Keiko, Gaia, and Day are six queer, mostly trans women surviving and thriving in Brooklyn. Visiting all the fixtures of fashionable 21st century queer society-picnics, literary readings, health conferences, drag shows, punk houses, community accountability processes, Grindr hookups-The Call-Out also engages with pressing questions around economic precarity, sexual consent, racism in queer spaces, and feminist theory, in the service of asking what it takes to build, or destroy, a marginalized community." |
| National Jewish Book Award, 2022JJ Greenberg Memorial Award for Fiction
| When the Shenkmans arrive on Division Street, their brilliant, lonely son Waldo, who has a native ability to find connections in everything, befriends Dr. Wilf, who is harboring a dark secret, setting in motion a chain of events that cause the past to come back with a vengeance. |
| International Latino Book Awards, 2023Latino Focused Fiction (English)Inspirational Fiction (English)Best Novel - Historical Fiction (Spanish)
| Widowed by the Texas Rangers in the fight over the disputed Rio Grande boundary, a Mexican woman, skilled at healing, joins the Mexican army and falls in love with a Yankee deserter. |
| International Latino Book Awards, 2023 | There was always an old woman dying in the back room of her grandmother's house when Isla was a child... |
| Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, 2022 | Shannon, an African American woman, follows her boyfriend to Morocco. There, she finds a toddler and makes the decision to adopt and raise the girl in Kentucky. But the girl already has a mother: Souria, an undocumented Mauritanian woman who was trafficked as a teen, and who managed to escape to Morocco to build another life. |
Black Cake by Charmaine Wilkerson | BCALA Literary Awards, 2023
| Eleanor Bennett's death leaves behind a puzzling inheritance for her two children, Byron and Benny: a traditional Caribbean black cake, made from a family recipe with a long history, and a voice recording. In her message, Eleanor shares a tumultuous story about a headstrong young swimmer who escapes her island home under suspicion of murder. Can Byron and Benny reclaim their once-close relationship, piece together Eleanor's true history, and fulfill her final request to 'share the black cake when the time is right'? |
| BCALA Literary Awards, 2023 | In 1973 Montgomery, Alabama, Civil Townsend, a young Black nurse working for the Montgomery Family Planning Clinic, grapples with her role when she takes two young girls into her heart and the unthinkable happens, and nothing will ever be the same for any of them. |
| Asian/Pacific American Awards, 2023
| On a year-long exchange program in rural Oregon, sixteen-year-old Hira must swap Kashmiri chai for volleyball practice and understand why everyone around her seems to dislike Obama. A skeptically witty narrator, Hira finds herself stuck between worlds. |
| Arab American Book Award, 2023
| A hunter and seller of illegal magic, Loulie al-Nazari, after saving the life of a cowardly prince, is blackmailed into finding an ancient lamp, drawing her into a world where nothing is what it seems and where she must decide who she will become in this new reality. |
| Arab American Book Award, 2023
| An Egyptian American woman visiting her parents' homeland begins a dark romance with an unemployed photographer who is addicted to cocaine and living in a rooftop shack in Cairo in a novel about identity politics. |
Aftermath by Terri Blackstock | Christy Awards, 2022Mystery, suspense, thriller
| A childhood friend and the faith she taught him got Dustin through his childhood. But friendship might be what destroys him now, and his faith is slipping away. |
| Christy Awards, 2022
| When Sarah returns home with hopes of running Old Depot Grocery, the long-buried past will be brought into the light and threaten not only to destroy the family business but sever the family ties. |
| Christy Awards, 2022
| When the Nazis march into Paris, an American woman uses her bookstore to aid the resistance, while a businessman chooses to sell his products to Germany--and send vital information home to the US. |
| National Book Critics Circle Awards, 2022 | A new creation by the author of Severance, the stories in Bliss Montage crash through our carefully built mirages. |