LibGuides: National Book Awards: 2020s

2020-2029

2024

WINNER

James by Percival Everett

FINALISTS

Ghostroots by 'Pemi Aguda
Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar
All Fours by Miranda July
My Friends by Hisham Matar

WINNER

Soldiers and Kings : Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling by Jason De León

FINALISTS:

Circle of Hope : a Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church by Eliza Griswold
Unshrinking : How to Face Fatphobia by Kate Manne
Knife : Meditations After an Attempted Murder by Salman Rushdie
Whiskey Tender by Deborah Jackson Taffa

WINNER

Something About Living by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

FINALISTS

Wrong Norma by Anne Carson
[...] by Fady Joudah
Mother by M. S. RedCherries
Modern Poetry by Diane Seuss

WINNER

Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ ; translated by Lin King

FINALISTS

The Book Censor's Library by Bothayna Al-Essa and Ranya Abdelrahman ; translated by Sawad Hussain
Ædnan : an epic by Linea Axelsson ; translated by Saskia Vogel
The Villain's Dance by Fiston Mwanza Mujila ; translated by Roland Glasser
Where the Wind Calls Home by Samar Yazbek ; translated by Leri Price

WINNER

Kareem Between by Shfa Saltagi Safadi

FINALISTS

Buffalo Dreamer by Violet Duncan
The Great Cool Ranch Dorito in the Sky by Josh Galarza
The First State of Being by Erin Entrada Kelly
The Unboxing of a Black Girl by Angela Shanté

The Great Cool Ranch Dorito in the Sky by Josh Galarza
Call Number: YAF GAL-J
ISBN: 9781250907714
Publication Date: 2024-07-23
Fueling all his anxieties into his comic book series, Brett must face the painful truths of his real life and his escalating eating disorder when someone posts his journal--and his deepest insecurities--online.
The First State of Being by Erin Entrada Kelly
Call Number: JUV F KEL
ISBN: 9780063337312
Publication Date: 2024-03-05
When Ridge, a time-traveling teenager from the future, gets trapped in 1999, he befriends Michael, a lonely twelve-year-old boy, changing the course of their lives forever.

2023

WINNER

Blackouts by Justin Torres

FINALISTS

Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
Temple Folk by Aaliyah Bilal
This Other Eden by Paul Harding
The End of Drum-Time by Hanna Pylväinen

WINNER

The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History by Ned Blackhawk

The Rediscovery of America : native peoples and the unmaking of U.S. history by Ned Blackhawk
Call Number: 970.1 B628r (Adult nonfiction)
ISBN: 9780300244052
Publication Date: 2023-04-25
The most enduring feature of U.S. history is the presence of Native Americans, yet most histories focus on Europeans and their descendants. This long practice of ignoring Indigenous history is changing, however, with a new generation of scholars insists that any full American history address the struggle, survival, and resurgence of American Indian nations. Indigenous history is essential to understanding the evolution of modern America. Ned Blackhawk interweaves five centuries of Native and non-Native histories, from Spanish colonial exploration to the rise of Native American self-determination in the late twentieth century. In this transformative synthesis he shows that: European colonization in the 1600s was never a predetermined success; Native nations helped shape England's crisis of empire; the first shots of the American Revolution were prompted by Indian affairs in the interior; California Indians targeted by federally funded militias were among the first casualties of the Civil War; the Union victory forever recalibrated Native communities across the West; twentieth-century reservation activists refashioned American law and policy. Blackhawk's retelling of U.S. history acknowledges the enduring power, agency, and survival of Indigenous peoples, yielding a truer account of the United States and revealing anew the varied meanings of America.

FINALISTS

Liliana's Invicible Summer: a Sister's Search for Justice by Cristina Rivera Garza
Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe
We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I: A Palestinian Memoir by Raja Shehadeh
Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World by John Vaillant

Fire Weather : a true story from a hotter world by John Vaillant
Call Number: 363.37 V131f (Adult nonfiction)
ISBN: 9781524732851
Publication Date: 2023-06-06
In May 2016, the city of Fort McMurray in Alberta, Canada, burned to the ground, forcing 88,000 people to flee their homes. It was the largest evacuation ever of a city in the face of a forest fire, raising the curtain on a new age of increasingly destructive wildfires. This book is a suspenseful account of one of North America's most devastating forest fires-and a stark exploration of our dawning era of climate catastrophes.

WINNER

from unincoporated territory[åmot] by Craig Santos Perez

FINALISTS

How to Communicate by John Lee Clark
suddenly we by Evie Shockley
Tripas by Brandon Som
From From by Monica Youn

WINNER

The Words That Remain by Stênio Gardel, translated by Bruna Dantas Lobato

FINALISTS

Cursed Bunny by Bora Chung; translated by Anton Hur
Beyond the Door of No Return by David Diop, translated by Sam Taylor
Abyss by Pilar Quintana, translated by Lisa Dillman
On a Woman's Madness by Astrid Roemer, translated by Lucy Scott

WINNER

A First Time for Everything by Dan Santat

A First Time for Everything by Dan. Santat
Call Number: JUV B SAN
ISBN: 9781626724150
Publication Date: 2023-02-28
A middle-grade graphic memoir based on bestselling author and Caldecott Medalist Dan Santat's awkward middle school years and the trip to Europe that changed his life. Dan's always been a good kid. The kind of kid who listens to his teachers, helps his mom with grocery shopping, and stays out of trouble. But being a good kid doesn't stop him from being bullied and feeling like he's invisible, which is why Dan has low expectations when his parents send him on a class trip to Europe. At first, he's right. He's stuck with the same girls from his middle school who love to make fun of him, and he doesn't know why his teacher insisted he come on this trip. But as he travels through France, Germany, Switzerland, and England, a series of first experiences begin to change him--first Fanta, first fondue, first time stealing a bike from German punk rockers... and first love. Funny, heartwarming, and poignant, A First Time for Everything is a feel-good coming-of-age memoir based on New York Times bestselling author and Caldecott Medal winner Dan Santat's awkward middle school years. It celebrates a time that is universally challenging for many of us, but also life-changing as well.

FINAL

Gather by Kenneth M. Cadow
Huda F Cares? by Huda Fahmy
Big by Vashti Harrison
The Lost Year: a Survival Story of the Ukrainian Famine by Katherine Marsh

Gather by Kenneth M. Cadow
Call Number: YA F CAD-KM
ISBN: 9781536231113
Publication Date: 2023-10-03
Ian Gray isn't supposed to have a dog, but a lot of things that shouldn't happen end up happening anyway. And Gather, Ian's adopted pup, is good company now that Ian has to quit the basketball team, find a job, and take care of his mom as she tries to overcome her opioid addiction. Despite the obstacles thrown their way, Ian is determined to keep his family afloat no matter what it takes. And for a little while, things are looking up: Ian makes friends, and his fondness for the outdoors and for fixing things lands him work helping neighbors. But an unforeseen tragedy results in Ian and his dog taking off on the run, trying to evade a future that would mean leaving their house and their land. Even if the community comes together to help him, would Ian and Gather have a home to return to?
Huda F Cares by Huda Fahmy
Call Number: YA G FAH-H
ISBN: 9780593532799
Publication Date: 2023-10-10
This summer's exercise in Fahmy family sisterly bonding involves a trip to Disney World--which seems like it is headed for disaster when Huda gets into a fight with a boy making fun of her hijab.
Big by Vashti Harrison
Call Number: EASY HAR (Easy fiction)
ISBN: 9780316353229
Publication Date: 2023-05-02
Praised for acting like a big girl when she is small, as a young girl grows, "big" becomes a word of criticism, until the girl realizes that she is fine just the way she is.
The Lost Year : a survival story of the Ukrainian famine by Katherine Marsh
Call Number: JUV F MAR
ISBN: 9781250313607
Publication Date: 2023-01-17
In the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, thirteen-year-old Matthew discovers a shocking secret about his great-grandmother's past as he learns about her life during the Holodomor famine in Soviet Ukraine.

2022

WINNER

The Rabbit Hutch by Tess Gunty

The Rabbit Hutch by Tess Gunty
Call Number: FIC GUNTY TES RA (Adult fiction)
ISBN: 9780593534663
Publication Date: 2022-08-02
The automobile industry has abandoned Vacca Vale, Indiana, leaving the residents behind, too. In a run-down apartment building on the edge of town, commonly known as the Rabbit Hutch, a number of people now reside quietly, looking for ways to live in a dying city. Apartment C2 is lonely and detached. C6 is aging and stuck. C8 harbors an extraordinary fear. But C4 is of particular interest. Here live four teenagers who have recently aged out of the state foster-care system: three boys and one girl, Blandine, who The Rabbit Hutch centers around. Hauntingly beautiful and unnervingly bright, Blandine is plagued by the structures, people, and places that not only failed her but actively harmed her. Now all Blandine wants is an escape, a true bodily escape like the mystics describe in the books she reads. Set across one week and culminating in a shocking act of violence, The Rabbit Hutch chronicles a town on the brink, desperate for rebirth. How far will its residents--especially Blandine--go to achieve it? Does one person's gain always come at another's expense?

FINALISTS

The Birdcatcher by Gayl Jones
The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories by Jamil Jan Kochai
All This Could Be Different by Sarah Thankam Mathews
The Town of Babylon by Alejandro Varela

WINNER

South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation by IMani Perry

South to America : a journey below the Mason-Dixon to understand the soul of a nation by Imani Perry
Call Number: 917.504 P463s (Adult nonfiction)
ISBN: 9780062977403
Publication Date: 2022-01-25
An essential, surprising journey through the history, rituals, and landscapes of the American South--and a revelatory argument for why you must understand the South in order to understand America.

FINALISTS

The Man Who Could Move Clouds: a Memoir by Ingrid Rojas Contreras
The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness by Meghan O'Rourke
Breathless: the Scientific Race to Defeat a Deadly Virus by David Quammen
His Name is George Floyd: One Man's Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice by Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipua

WINNER

All My Rage by Sabaa Tahir

All My Rage by Sabaa Tahir
Call Number: YA F TAH-S (Young adult fiction)
ISBN: 9780593202340
Publication Date: 2022-03-01
A family extending from Pakistan to California, deals with generations of young love, old regrets, and forgiveness.
All My Rage [E-Book] by Sabaa Tahir
Call Number: YA F TAH-S Ebook (OverDrive)
ISBN: 9780593202357
Publication Date: 2022-03-01
All My Rage [streaming audiobook] by Sabaa Tahir
Call Number: YA F TAH-S Audiobk (OverDrive)
ISBN: 9780593502235
Publication Date: 2022

FINALISTS

The Ogress and the Orphans by Kelly Barnhill
The Lesbiana's Guide to Catholic School by Sonora Reyes
Victory. Stand!: Raising My Fist For Justice by Tommie Smith, Derrick Barnes, Dawud Anyabwile
Maizy Chen's Last Chance by Lisa Yee

Victory. Stand! : raising my fist for justice by Tommie Smith; Derrick Barnes
Call Number: YA B SMI-T (Young adult biography)
ISBN: 9781324003908
Publication Date: 2022-09-27
On October 16, 1968, during the medal ceremony at the Mexico City Olympics, Tommie Smith, the gold medal winner in the 200-meter sprint, and John Carlos, the bronze medal winner, stood on the podium in black socks and raised their black-gloved fists to protest racial injustice inflicted upon African Americans. Both men were forced to leave the Olympics, received death threats, and faced ostracism and continuing economic hardships. In his first-ever memoir for young readers, Tommie Smith looks back on his childhood growing up in rural Texas through to his stellar athletic career, culminating in his historic victory and Olympic podium protest.
Maizy Chen's Last Chance by Lisa Yee
Call Number: Juv F YEE (Juvenile fiction)
ISBN: 9781984830258
Publication Date: 2022-02-01
Eleven-year-old Maizy Chen visits her estranged grandparents, who own and run a Chinese restaurant in Last Chance, Minnesota; as her visit lengthens, she makes unexpected discoveries about her family's history and herself.

LONGLIST

The Ogress and the Orphans by Kelly Barnhill
The Life and Crimes of Hoodie Rosen by Isaac Blum
A Thousand Steps into Night by Traci Chee
Swim Team by Johnnie Christmas
Self-Made Boys : a Great Gatsby Remix by Anna-Marie McLemore
The Lesbiana's Guide to Catholic School by Sonora Reyes
Victory. Stand! : Raising My Fist for Justice by Tommie Smith, Derrick Barnes, and Dawud Anyabwile
All My Rage by Sabaa Tahir
Lotus Bloom and the Afro Revolution by Sherri Winston
Maizy Chen's Last Chance by Lisa Yee

2021

WINNER

Hell of a Book by Jason Mott
Call Number: FIC MOTT JAS HE (Adult fiction)
ISBN: 9780593330968
Publication Date: 2021-06-29
Soot, a young Black boy, lives in a rural town in the recent past. The Kid, a possibly imaginary child appears to a Black author on a cross-country publicity tour to promote his bestselling novel. As their stories build and converge, they astonish. As the nation reckons with a tragic police shooting playing over and over again on the news, what it can mean to be Black in America? Who has been killed? Who is The Kid? Will the author finish his book tour, and what kind of world will he leave behind?

FINALISTS

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr
Matrix by Lauren Groff
Zorrie by Laird Hunt
The Prophets by Robert Jones, Jr.

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr
Call Number: FIC DOERR ANT CL (Adult fiction)
ISBN: 9781982168438
Publication Date: 2021-09-28
The heroes of Cloud Cuckoo Land are children trying to figure out the world around them, and to survive. In the besieged city of Constantinople in 1453, in a public library in Lakeport, Idaho, today, and on a spaceship bound for a distant exoplanet decades from now, an ancient text provides solace and the most profound human connection to characters in peril. They all learn the story of Aethon, who longs to be turned into a bird so that he can fly to the paradise of Cloud Cuckoo Land, a better world. Twelve-year-old Anna lives in a convent where women toil all day embroidering the robes of priests. She learns to read from an old Greek tutor she encounters on her errands in the city. In an abandoned priory, she finds a stash of old books. One is Aethon's story, which she reads to her sister as the walls of Constantinople are bombarded by armies of Saracens. Anna escapes, carrying only a small sack with bread, salt fish-and the book. Outside the city walls, Anna meets Omeir, a village boy who was conscripted, along with his beloved pair of oxen, to fight in the Sultan's conquest. His oxen have died; he has deserted. In Lakeport, Idaho, in 2020, Seymour, a young activist bent on saving the earth, sits in the public library with two homemade bombs in pressure cookers-another siege. Upstairs, eighty-five-year old Zeno, a former prisoner-of-war, and an amateur translator, rehearses five children in a play adaptation of Aethon's adventures. On an interstellar ark called The Argos, Konstance is alone in a vault with sacks of Nourish powder and access to all the information in the world-or so she is told. She knows Aethon's story through her father, who has sequestered her to protect her. Konstance, encased on a spaceship decades from now, has never lived on our beloved Earth. Alone in a vault with sacks of Nourish powder and access to "all the information in the world," she knows Aethon's storythrough her father. Like Marie-Laure and Werner in All the Light We Cannot See, Konstance, Anna, Omeir, Seymour, the young Zeno, the children in the library are dreamers and misfits on the cusp of adulthood in a world the grown-ups have broken. They through their own resilience and resourcefulness, and through story. Dedicated to "the librarians then, now, and in the years to come.

Matrix by Lauren Groff
Call Number: FIC GROFF LAU MA (Adult fiction)
ISBN: 9781594634499
Publication Date: 2021-09-07
Cast out of the royal court by Eleanor of Aquitaine, deemed too coarse and rough-hewn for marriage or courtly life, seventeen-year-old Marie de France is sent to England to be the new prioress of an impoverished abbey, its nuns on the brink of starvation and beset by disease. At first taken aback by the severity of her new life, Marie finds focus and love in collective life with her singular and mercurial sisters. In this crucible, Marie steadily supplants her desire for family, for her homeland, for the passions of her youth with something new to her: devotion to her sisters, and a conviction in her own divine visions. Marie, born the last in a long line of women warriors and crusaders, is determined to chart a bold new course for the women she now leads and protects.

Zorrie [E-Book] by Laird Hunt
Call Number: FIC HUNT LAI ZO Ebook (OverDrive
ISBN: 9781635575378
Publication Date: 2021
It was Indiana, it was the dirt she had bloomed up out of, it was who she was, what she felt, how she thought, what she knew." As a girl, Zorrie Underwood's modest and hardscrabble home county was the only constant in her young life. After losing both her parents, Zorrie moved in with her aunt, whose own death orphaned Zorrie all over again, casting her off into the perilous realities and sublime landscapes of rural, Depression-era Indiana. Drifting west, Zorrie survived on odd jobs, sleeping in barns and under the stars, before finding a position at a radium processing plant. At the end of each day, the girls at her factory glowed from the radioactive material. But when Indiana calls Zorrie home, she finally finds the love and community that have eluded her in and around the small town of Hillisburg. And yet, even as she tries to build a new life, Zorrie discovers that her trials have only begun.

WINNER

All That She Carried : the Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake by Tiya Miles

All That She Carried : the journey of Ashley's sack, a black family keepsake by Tiya Miles
Call Number: 306.3 M643a (Adult nonfiction)
ISBN: 9781984854995
Publication Date: 2021-06-08
All That She Carried [E-Book] : the journey of Ashley's sack, a black family keepsake by Tiya Miles
Call Number: 306.362 M643a Ebook (OverDrive)
ISBN: 9781984855008
Publication Date: 2021

FINALISTS

A Little Devil in America : Notes in Praise of Black Performance by Hanif Abdurraqib
Running Out : In Search of Water on the High Plains by Lucas Bessire
Tastes Like War : a Memoir by Grace M. Cho
Covered with Night : a Story of Murder and Indigenous Justice in Early America by Nicole Eustace

A Little Devil in America : notes in praise of Black performance by Hanif Abdurraqib
Call Number: 791.089 A136L (Adult nonfiction)
ISBN: 9781984801197
Publication Date: 2021-03-30
A Little Devil in America is an urgent project that unravels all modes and methods of Black performance, in this moment when Black performers are coming to terms with their value, reception, and immense impact on America. With sharp insight, humor, and heart, Abdurraqib examines how Black performance happens in specific moments in time and space--midcentury Paris, the moon, or a cramped living room in Columbus, Ohio. At the outset of this project, Abdurraqib became fascinated with clips of Black minstrel entertainers like William Henry Lane, better known as Master Juba. Knowing there was something more complicated and deep-seated in the history and legacy of minstrelsy, Abdurraqib uncovered questions and tensions that help to reveal how Black performance pervades all areas of American society. Abdurraqib's prose is entrancing and fluid as he leads us along the links in his remarkable trains of thought. A Little Devil in America considers, critiques, and praises performance in music, sports, writing, comedy, grief, games, and love.
Running Out : in search of water on the high plains by Lucas Bessire
Call Number: 333.91 B559r (Adult nonfiction)
ISBN: 9780691212647
Publication Date: 2021-05-18
Tastes Like War : a memoir by Grace M. Cho
Call Number: BIO CHO GRAM T (Adult biography)
ISBN: 9781952177941
Publication Date: 2021-05-18
Covered with Night : a story of murder and indigenous justice in early America by Nicole Eustace
Call Number: 364.152 E91c (Adult fiction)
ISBN: 9781631495878
Publication Date: 2021-04-27

LONGLIST

The Longlist was announced September 2021. It includes the books listed below as well as the winner and finalists.

The Ground Breaking : an American City and Its Search for Justice by Scott Ellsworth
The Sum of Us : What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together by Heather McGhee
The Free World : Art and Though in the Cold War by Louis Menand
How the Word is Passed : a Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America by Clint Smith
The Black Civil War Soldier : a Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship by Deborah Willis

WINNER

Floaters by Martín Espada

Floaters : poems by Martin Espada
Call Number: 811.54 E77f (Adult nonfiction)
ISBN: 9780393541038
Publication Date: 2021-01-19

FINALISTS

What Noise Against the Cane by Desiree C. Bailey
Sho by Douglas Kearney
A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure by Hoa Nguyen

LONGLIST

The Longlist was announced September 2021. It includes the books listed below as well as the winner and finalists.

The Wild Fox of Yemen by Threa Almontaser
Ghost Letters by Baba Badji
Master Suffering by C. M. Burroughs
The Vault by Andrés Cerpa

WINNER

Winter in Sokcho by Elisa Suha Dusapin; translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins

Winter in Sokcho by Elisa Shua Dusapin; Aneesa Abbas Higgins (Translator)
Call Number: FIC DUSAP ELIS WI (Adult fiction)
ISBN: 9781948830416
Publication Date: 2021-04-27

FINALISTS

Peach Blossom Paradise by Ge Fei; translated by Canaan Morse
The Twilight Zone by Nona Fernández; translated by Natasha Wimmer
When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut; translated by Adrian Nathan West
Planet of Clay by Samar Yazbek; translated by Leri Price

Peach Blossom Paradise by Ge Fei; Canaan Morse (Translator)
Call Number: FIC FEI GE PE (Adult fiction)
ISBN: 9781681374703
Publication Date: 2020-12-08
In 1898, China experienced one hundred days of utopia, after a cabal of reformist intellectuals persuaded the young emperor to enact sweeping changes intended to modernize the country and bring about the "Great Unity." Their movement ended in blood and the crowning of two more dictators, but not before it whetted an appetite for revolution all across the country - an appetite that would eventually consume millions of lives. One such life belongs to Xiumi, the young daughter of a wealthy landowner and former government official who goes insane over a painting, then mysteriously disappears. Days later, Xiumi's mother welcomes to the estate a young man who carries a grand but brutal vision in his heart and a gold cicada in his pocket. When his plans collapse, Xiumi inherits his vision, just as she herself begins fighting the Confucian social mores that view women as property. On her wedding day, she becomes a pawn in a series of violent transactions carried out by men who think they are building paradise; as each one fails, she attempts to repay them in kind by spearheading a movement of her own. Her campaign for change is always a fight to win control of her own body; and the cost of even that is nearly total.
The Twilight Zone by Nona Fernández; Natasha Wimmer (Translator)
Call Number: FIC FERNA NON TW (Adult fiction)
ISBN: 9781644450475
Publication Date: 2021-03-16
It's 1984 in Chile, in the middle of the Pinochet dictatorship. A member of the secret police walks into the office of a dissident magazine and finds a reporter, who records his testimony. The narrator of Nona Fernández's mesmerizing and terrifying novel The Twilight Zone is a child when she first sees this man's face on the magazine's cover with the words "I Tortured People." His complicity in the worst crimes of the regime and his commitment to speaking about them haunt the narrator into her adulthood and career as a writer and documentarian. Like a secret service agent from the future, through extraordinary feats of the imagination, Fernández follows the "man who tortured people" to places that archives can't reach, into the sinister twilight zone of history where morning routines, a game of chess, Yuri Gagarin, and the eponymous TV show of the novel's title coexist with the brutal yet commonplace machinations of the regime.
When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut; Adrian Nathan West (Translator)
Call Number: FIC LABAT BEN WH (Adult fiction)
ISBN: 9781681375663
Publication Date: 2021-09-28
A fast-paced, mind-expanding literary work about scientific discovery, ethics and the unsettled distinction between genius and madness.Albert Einstein opens a letter sent to him from the Eastern Front of World War I. Inside, he finds the first exact solution to the equations of general relativity, unaware that it contains a monster that could destroy his life's work.The great mathematician Alexander Grothendieck tunnels so deeply into abstraction that he tries to cut all ties with the world, terrified of the horror his discoveries might cause.Erwin Schrödinger and Werner Heisenberg battle over the soul of physics after creating two equivalent yet opposed versions of quantum mechanics. Their fight will tear the very fabric of reality, revealing a world stranger than they could have ever imagined.
Planet of Clay by Samar Yazbek; Leri Price (Translator)
Call Number: FIC YAZBE SAM PL (Adult fiction)
ISBN: 9781642861013
Publication Date: 2021-10-05
Rima, a young girl from Damascus, longs to walk, to be free to follow the will of her feet, but instead is perpetually constrained. She finds refuge in a fantasy world full of colored crayons, secret planets, and The Little Prince, reciting passages of the Qur'an like a mantra as everything and everyone around her is blown to bits. Since Rima hardly ever speaks, people think she's crazy, but she is no fool--the madness is in the battered city around her. One day while taking a bus through Damascus, a soldier opens fire and her mother is killed. Rima, wounded, is taken to a military hospital before her brother leads her to the besieged area of Ghouta--where, between bombings, she writes her story.

LONGLIST

The Longlist was announced September 2021. It includes the books listed below as well as the winner and finalists. .

Waiting for the Waters to Rise by Maryse Condé
On the Origin of Species and Other Stories by Bo-Young Kim
Rabbit Island : Stories by Elvia Navarro
An Inventory of Losses by Judith Schalansky
In Memory of Memory by Maria Stepanova

WINNER

Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo

FINALISTS

The Legend of Auntie Po by Shing Yin Khor
Too Bright to See by Kyle Lukoff
Revolution in Our Time : the Black Panther Party's Promise to the People by Kekla Magoon
Me (Moth) by Amber McBride

The Legend of Auntie Po by Shing Yin Khor
Call Number: Juv G KHO (Juvenile graphic books)
ISBN: 9780525554882
Publication Date: 2021-06-15
Aware of the racial tumult in the years after the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, Mei tries to remain blissfully focused on her job, her close friendship with the camp foreman's daughter, and telling stories about Paul Bunyan--reinvented as Po Pan Yin (Auntie Po), an elderly Chinese matriarch.
Me (Moth) by Amber McBride
Call Number: YA F MBR-A (Young adult fiction)
ISBN: 9781250780362
Publication Date: 2021-08-17
Moth, who lost her family in an accident, and Sani, who is battling ongoing depression, take a road trip that has them chasing ghosts and searching for ancestors, which helps them move forward in surprising, powerful and unforgettable ways.
Revolution in Our Time: the Black Panther Party's Promise to the People by Kekla Magoon
Call Number: YA 322.4 MAG-K (Young adult nonfiction)
ISBN: 9781536214185
Publication Date: 2021-11-08
In this comprehensive, inspiring, and all-too-relevant history of the Black Panther Party, Kekla Magoon introduces readers to the Panthers' community activism, grounded in the concept of self-defense, which taught Black Americans how to protect and support themselves in a country that treated them like second-class citizens. For too long the Panthers' story has been a footnote to the civil rights movement rather than what it was: a revolutionary socialist movement that drew thousands of members--mostly women--and became the target of one of the most sustained repression efforts ever made by the U.S. government against its own citizens.

LONGLIST

The Longlist was announced September 2021. It includes the books listed below as well as the winner and finalists listed above.

Unspeakable : the Tulsa Race Massacre by Carole Boston Weatherford and Floyd Cooper
Home is Not a Country by Safia Elhillo
A Snake Falls to Earth by Carcie Little Badger
The Mirror Season by Anna-Marie McLemore
From a Whisper to a Rallying Cry : the Killing of Vincent Chin and the Trial that Galvanized the Asian American Movement by Paula Yoo

Unspeakable : the Tulsa Race Massacre by Carole Boston Weatherford; Floyd Cooper (Illustrator)
Call Number: Juv 976.6 WEA (Juvenile nonfiction)
ISBN: 9781541581203
Publication Date: 2021-02-02
On May 31 and June 1, 1921, an armed mob looted homes and businesses as Black families fled. The police did nothing to protect Greenwood, and as many as three hundred African Americans were killed, most buried in unmarked graves. Thousands were left homeless. No official investigation occurred until seventy-five years later. Unspeakable helps young readers understand the events of the Tulsa, Oklahoma race massacre, one of the worst incidents of racial violence in our nation's history.
Home Is Not a Country by Safia Elhillo
Call Number: YA F ELH-S (Young adult fiction)
ISBN: 9780593177051
Publication Date: 2021-03-02
Nima doesn't feel understood. By her mother, who grew up far away in a different land. By her suburban town, which makes her feel too much like an outsider to fit in and not enough like an outsider to feel like that she belongs somewhere else. At least she has her childhood friend Haitham, with whom she can let her guard down and be herself. Until she doesn't. As the ground is pulled out from under her, Nima must grapple with the phantom of a life not chosen, the name her parents didn't give her at birth: Yasmeen. But that other name, that other girl, might just be more real than Nima knows. And more hungry. And the life Nima has, the one she keeps wishing were someone else's...she might have to fight for it with a fierceness she never knew she had.
A Snake Falls to Earth by Darcie Little Badger
Call Number: YA F LIT-D (Young adult fiction)
ISBN: 9781646140923
Publication Date: 2021-11-23
Nina is a Lipan girl in our world. She's always felt there was something more out there. She still believes in the old stories. Oli is a cottonmouth kid, from the land of spirits and monsters. Like all cottonmouths, he's been cast from home. He's found a new one on the banks of the bottomless lake. Nina and Oli have no idea the other exists. But a catastrophic event on Earth, and a strange sickness that befalls Oli's best friend, will drive their worlds together in ways they haven't been in centuries. And there are some who will kill to keep them apart.
The Mirror Season by Anna-Marie McLemore
Call Number: YA F MLE-AM (Young adult fiction)
ISBN: 9781250624123
Publication Date: 2021-03-16
Graciela's whole world changes after she and a boy she barely knows are assaulted at the same party. She loses her gift for making enchanted pan dulce. Neighborhood trees vanish overnight, while mirrored glass appears, bringing reckless magic with it. Ciela is haunted by what happened to her, but when the boy, Lock, shows up at Ciela's school, he has no memory of that night, and no clue that a single piece of mirrored glass is taking his life apart. Ciela knows who assaulted her-- and him. And she knows that their survival depends on no one finding out what really happened.
From a Whisper to a Rallying Cry : the killing of Vincent Chin and the trial that galvanized the Asian American movement by Paula Yoo
Call Number: YA 305.895 YOO-P (Young adult nonfiction)
ISBN: 9781324002871
Publication Date: 2021-04-20
America in 1982. Japanese car companies are on the rise and believed to be putting American autoworkers out of their jobs. Anti-Asian American sentiments simmer, especially in Detroit. A bar fight turns fatal, leaving Vincent Chin--a Chinese American man--beaten to death at the hands of two white men, autoworker Ronald Ebens and his stepson Michael Nitz. When Ebens and Nitz pled guilty to manslaughter and received only a $3,000 fine and three years' probation, the lenient sentence sparked outrage in the Asian American community. This outrage galvanized the Asian American movement and paved the way for a new federal civil rights trial of the case. Extensively researched from court transcripts and interviews with key case witnesses--many speaking for the first time--Yoo has crafted a suspenseful, nuanced, and authoritative portrait of a pivotal moment in civil rights history, and a man who became a symbol against hatred and racism.

2020

WINNER

Interior Chinatown by Yu, Charles
Call Number: FIC YU CHA IN (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780307907196
Publication Date: 2020-01-28
Every day Willis Wu leaves his tiny room in a Chinatown SRO and enters the Golden Palace restaurant, where Black and White, a procedural cop show, is in perpetual production. He's a bit player here too, but he dreams of being Kung Fu Guy-- and he sees his life as a script. After stumbling into the spotlight, Willis finds himself launched into a wider world than he has ever known, discovering not only the secret history of Chinatown, but the buried legacy of his own family, and what that means for him in today's America.

FINALISTS

Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam
A Children's Bible by Lydia Millet
The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw
Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuary

Leave the World Behind by Alam, Rumaan
Call Number: FIC ALAM RUM L (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780062667632
Publication Date: 2020-10-06
A magnetic novel about two families, strangers to each other, who are forced together on a long weekend gone terribly wrong.
A Children's Bible by Millet, Lydia
Call Number: FIC MILLE LYD CH (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9781324005032
Publication Date: 2020-05-12
Follows a group of children and their families on summer vacation at a lakeside mansion. The teenage narrator Eve and the other children are contemptuous of their parents, who spend the days and nights in drunken stupor. This tension heightens when a great storm arrives and throws the house and its residents into chaos. Named for a picture Bible given to Eve's little brother Jack, A Children's Bible is loosely structured around events and characters that often appear in collections of Bible stories intended for young readers. These narrative touchstones are embedded in a backdrop of environmental and psychological distress as the children reject the parents for their emotional and moral failures-in part as normal teenagers must, and in part for their generation's passivity and denial in the face of cataclysmic change. In A Children's Bible, Millet offers brilliant commentary on the environment and human weakness and a vision of what awaits us on the other side of Revelations.
The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Philyaw, Deesha
Call Number: FIC PHYLY DEE SE (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9781949199734
Publication Date: 2020-09-01
The Secret Lives of Church Ladies explores the raw and tender places where black women and girls dare to follow their desires and pursue a momentary reprieve from being good. The nine stories in this collection feature four generations of characters grappling with who they want to be in the world, caught as they are between the church's double standards and their own needs and passions.
CONTENTS: Eula -- Not-Daniel -- Dear sister -- Peach cobbler -- Snowfall -- How to make love to a physicist -- Jael -- Instructions for married Christian husbands -- When Eddie LEvert comes.
Shuggie Bain by Stuart, Douglas
Call Number: FIC STUAR DOU S (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780802148049
Publication Date: 2020-02-11
Hugh "Shuggie" Bain spends his 1980s childhood in public housing in Glasgow, Scotland. Thatcher's war on heavy industry has put husbands and sons out of work, and the city's notorious drugs epidemic is waiting in the wings. His mother Agnes is Shuggie's guiding light but a burden for his siblings. Dreaming of a house with its own front door and ordering happiness on credit as her husband philanders, Agnes keeps her pride by looking good but finds solace in drink. As she swings between alcoholic binges and sobriety, Agnes's addiction has the power to eclipse everyone close to her-- especially her beloved Shuggie.

This Longlist was announced on September 18, 2020. It includes the books listed below as well as the winner and finalists.

The Index of Self-Destructive Acts by Christopher Beha
The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
If I Had Two Wings by Randall Kenan
A Burning by Megha Majumdar
The Great Offshore Grounds by Vaness Veselka

The Index of Self-Destructive Acts by Beha, Christopher
Call Number: FIC BEHA CHR IN (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9781947793828
Publication Date: 2020-05-05
The day Sam Waxworth arrives in New York to write for The Interviewer, a street-corner preacher declares that the world is coming to an end. A sports statistician, data journalist, and newly minted media celebrity who correctly forecasted every outcome of the 2008 election, Sam's familiar with predicting the future. But when projection meets reality, things turn complicated. Sam's editor sends him to profile disgraced political columnist Frank Doyle. To most readers, Doyle is a liberal lion turned neocon Iraq war apologist, but to Sam he is above all the author of the great works of baseball lore that sparked Sam's childhood love of the game-books he now views as childish myth-making to be crushed with his empirical hammer. But Doyle proves something else in person: charming, intelligent, and more convincing than Sam could have expected. Then there is his daughter, Margo, to whom Sam becomes desperately attracted - just as his wife, Lucy, arrives from Wisconsin. The lives of these characters are entwined with those of the rest of the Doyle family-Frank's wife, Kit, whose investment bank collapsed during the financial crisis; his son, Eddie, an Army veteran just returned from his second combat tour; and Eddie's best childhood friend, hedge funder Justin Price. While the end of the world might not be arriving, Beha's characters are each headed for apocalypses of their own making.
The Vanishing Half by Bennett, Brit
Call Number: FIC BENNE BRI V (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780525536291
Publication Date: 2020-06-02
The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age sixteen, it's not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it's everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Ten years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other secretly passes for white, and her white husband knows nothing of her past. Still, even separated by so many miles and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined. What will happen to the next generation, when their own daughters' storylines intersect?
If I Had Two Wings : stories by Kenan, Randall
Call Number: FIC KENAN RAN IF (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9781324005469
Publication Date: 2020-08-04
Ten heavenly stories that chronicle ineffable events in ordinary lives. When Randall Kenan's first collection was published, The New York Times called it "nothing short of a wonder-book." With comparable inventiveness but seasoned by maturity and shot through with humor, his second collection, If I Had Two Wings, riffs on the human relationship with the transcendent. Rooted in Kenan's fictional territory of Tims Creek, NC, this book also travels to more "sophisticated" places, as these ten stories chronicle ineffable events in ordinary lives.
A Burning by Majumdar, Megha
Call Number: FIC MAJUM MEG BU (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780525658696
Publication Date: 2020-06-02
After a fiery attack on a train leaves 104 people dead, the fates of three people become inextricably entangled. Jivan, a bright, striving woman from the slums looking for a way out of poverty, is wrongly accused of planning the attack because of a careless comment on Facebook. PT Sir, a slippery gym teacher from Jivan's former high school, has hitched his aspirations to a rising right wing party, and his own ascent becomes increasingly linked to Jivan's fall. Lovely, a spirited, impoverished, relentlessly optimistic hjira, who harbors dreams of becoming a Bollywood star, can provide the alibi that would set Jivan free - but her appearance in court will have unexpected consequences that will change the course of all of their lives. A novel about fate, power, opportunity, and class; about innocence and guilt, betrayal and love, and the corrosive media cycle that manufactures falsehoods masquerading as truths--A Burning is a debut novel of exceptional power and urgency, haunting and beautiful, brutal, vibrant, impossible to forget.
The Great Offshore Grounds by Veselka, Vanessa
Call Number: FIC VESEL VAN GR (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780525658078
Publication Date: 2020-08-25
On the day of their estranged father's wedding, half-sisters Cheyenne and Livy set off to claim their inheritance. It's been years since the two have seen each other. Cheyenne is newly back in Seattle, crashing with Livy after a failed marriage and a series of dead ends. Livy works refinishing boats, her resentment against her free-loading sister growing as she tamps down dreams of fishing off the coast of Alaska. But the promise of a shot at financial security brings the two together to claim what's theirs. Except: instead of money, their father gives them information-a name-that both reveals a stunning secret and compels them to come to grips with it. Parallel and individually, the sisters and their adopted brother set out on journeys that will test their faith in each other, as well as their definitions of freedom.

WINNER

The Dead Are Arising : the life of Malcolm X by Les Payne; Tamara Payne
Call Number: BIO X MAL P (Adult Biography)
ISBN: 9781631491665
Publication Date: 2020-10-20
Setting Malcolm's life not only within the Nation of Islam but against the larger backdrop of American history, the book traces the life of one of the twentieth century's most politically relevant figures "from street criminal to devoted moralist and revolutionary." In tracing Malcolm X's life from his Nebraska birth in 1925 to his Harlem assassination in 1965, Payne provides searing vignettes culled from Malcolm's Depression-era youth, describing the influence of his Garveyite parents: his father, Earl, a circuit-riding preacher who was run over by a street car in Lansing, Michigan, in 1929, and his mother, Louise, who continued to instill black pride in her children after Earl's death. Filling each chapter with resonant drama, Payne follows Malcolm's exploits as a petty criminal in Boston and Harlem in the 1930s and early 1940s to his religious awakening and conversion to the Nation of Islam in a Massachusetts penitentiary. With a biographer's unwavering determination, Payne corrects the historical record and delivers extraordinary revelations-from the unmasking of the mysterious NOI founder "Fard Muhammad," who preceded Elijah Muhammad; to a hair-rising scene, conveyed in cinematic detail, of Malcolm and Minister Jeremiah X Shabazz's 1961 clandestine meeting with the KKK; to a minute-by-minute account of Malcolm X's murder at the Audubon Ballroom.

FINALISTS

Finalists were announced on October 6, 2020 and include the winner as well as this list.

Unworthy Republic : the Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory by Claudio Saunt
My Autobiography of Carson McCullers by Jenn Shapland
The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo and Villavicencio
How to Make a Slave and Other Essays by Jerald Walker

Unworthy Republic : the dispossession of native Americans and the road to Indian Territory by Claudio Saunt
Call Number: 323.11 S257u (Adult nonfiction)
ISBN: 9780393609844
Publication Date: 2020-03-24
CONTENTS: Introduction: "Words are delusive" -- White supremacy and Indian territory. Aboriginia ; The White people of Georgia -- The view from Washington City. The debate ; "Forked tongue and shallow hart" -- The best laid plans. The plan of operations ; The cholera times -- Financing dispossession. The financiers ; "A combination of designing speculators" -- From expulsion to extermination. 1836: the southern world at war ; At the point of a bayonet ; 'Tis no sin -- Afterword: The price of expulsion.
My Autobiography of Carson Mccullers by Jenn Shapland
Call Number: BIO MCULL CAR S (Adult biography)
ISBN: 9781947793286
Publication Date: 2020-02-04
Shapland, Jenn, 1987-
McCullers, Carson, 1917-1967.
The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
Call Number: 364.1 C813u (Adult nonfiction)
ISBN: 9780399592683
Publication Date: 2020-03-24
Traveling across the country, journalist Karla Cornejo Villavicencio risked arrest at every turn to report the extraordinary stories of her fellow undocumented Americans. Her subjects have every reason to be wary around reporters, but Cornejo Villavicencio has unmatched access to their stories. Her work culminates in a stunning, essential read for our times.
How to Make a Slave and Other Essays by Walker, Jerald
Call Number: 305.896 W181h (Adult nonfiction)
ISBN: 9780814255995
Publication Date: 2020-10-30

This Longlist was announced on September 17, 2020. It includes the books listed below as well as the winner and finalists. Books available through Unger Memorial Library are in blue.

Is Rape a Crime? : a memoir, an investigation, and a manifesto by Michelle Bowdler
If Then : how the Simulmatics Corporation invented the future by Jill Lepore
Owls of the Eastern Ice : a quest to find and save the world's largest owl by Jonathan C. Claght
Afropessimism by Frank B. WIlderson III
Caste : the origins of our discontents by Isabel Wilkerson

Caste : the origins of our discontents by Isabel Wilkerson
Call Number: 305.5 W681c (Adult Nonfiction)
ISBN: 9780593230251
Publication Date: 2020-08-04
Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings. Beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste system that influences people's lives and behavior and the nation's fate. Linking the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson explores eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will, bloodlines, stigma, and more. Using riveting stories about people--including Martin Luther King, Jr., baseball's Satchel Paige, a single father and his toddler son, Wilkerson herself, and many others--she shows the ways that the insidious undertow of caste is experienced every day. She documents how the Nazis studied the racial systems in America to plan their out-cast of the Jews; she discusses why the cruel logic of caste requires that there be a bottom rung for those in the middle to measure themselves against; she writes about the surprising health costs of caste, in depression and life expectancy, and the effects of this hierarchy on our culture and politics. Finally, she points forward to ways America can move beyond the artificial and destructive separations of human divisions, toward hope in our common humanity.

WINNER

DMZ Colony by Don Mee Choi - on order

FINALISTS

The finalists were announced on October 6, 2020.

A Treatise on Stars by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
Fantasia for the Man in Blue by Tommye Blount
Borderland Apocrypha by Anthony Cody
Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz

A Treatise on Stars by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
Call Number: 811.54 B535t (Adult nonfiction)
ISBN: 9780811229388
Publication Date: 2020-02-25
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge's A Treatise on Stars extends the intensely phenomenological poetics of 'The Star Field' in Empathy, which appeared over thirty years ago. The book is structured as a continuous enfolding of poems, each made up of numbered serial parts, their presiding poetic consciousness moving from the desert arroyo of New Mexico to the white-tailed deer of Maine and between conversations with daughter, husband, friends, pets (corn snake and poodle), and a woman, or star-visitor, beneath a tree who calls 'any spirit in matter ... star-walking.' These are poems of deep listening and patient waiting, open to the channeling of daily experience, to gestalt and angel, dolphins and extraterrestrials.
Fantasia for the Man in Blue by Tommye Blount
Call Number: 811.6 B657f (Adult nonfiction)
ISBN: 9781945588495
Publication Date: 2020-03-02
An examination of a brutal America through the voices of its most vulnerable sons. In his debut collection, Fantasia for the Man in Blue, Tommye Blount orchestrates a chorus of distinct, unforgettable voices that speak to the experience of the black, queer body as a site of desire and violence.
Borderland Apocrypha by Anthony Cody
Call Number: 811.6 C671b (Adult nonfiction)
ISBN: 9781632430762
Publication Date: 2020-04-15
Borderland Apocrypha is centered around the collective histories of Mexican lynchings following the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, and the subsequent erasures, traumas, and state-sanctioned violences committed towards communities of color in the present day. Cody's debut collection responds to the destabilized, hostile landscapes and silenced histories via an experimental poetic that invents and shapeshifts in both form and space across the margin, the page, and the book's axis in a resistance, a reclamation and a re-occupation of what has been omitted. Part autohistoria, part docupoetic, part visual monument, part myth-making, Borderland Apocrypha exhumes the past in order to work toward survival, reckoning, and future- building.
Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz
Call Number: 811.6 D542p (Adult nonfiction)
ISBN: 9781644450147
Publication Date: 2020-03-03
Postcolonial Love Poem is an anthem of desire against erasure. Natalie Diaz's brilliant second collection demands that every body carried in its pages - bodies of language, land, rivers, suffering brothers, enemies, and lovers - be touched and held as beloveds. Through these poems, the wounds inflicted by America onto an indigenous people are allowed to bloom pleasure and tenderness.

This longlist was announced on September 17, 2020.

The Galleons by Rick Barot
Travesty Generator by Lillian-Yvonne Bertam
Obit by Victoria Chang
Guillotine by Eduardo C. Corral
The Age of Phillis by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers

WINNER

Tokyo Ueno Station by Yu Miri

Tokyo Ueno Station by Yu, Miri
Call Number: FIC YU MIR T (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780593088029
Publication Date: 2020-06-23
A surreal, devastating story of a homeless ghost who haunts one of Tokyo's busiest train stations. Kazu is dead. Born in Fukushima in 1933, the same year as the Japanese Emperor, his life is tied by a series of coincidences to the Imperial family and has been shaped at every turn by modern Japanese history. But his life story is also marked by bad luck, and now, in death, he is unable to rest, doomed to haunt the park near Ueno Station in Tokyo. Kazu's life in the city began and ended in that park; he arrived there to work as a laborer in the preparations for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and ended his days living in the vast homeless village in the park, traumatized by the destruction of the 2011 tsunami and shattered by the announcement of the 2020 Olympics. Through Kazu's eyes, we see daily life in Tokyo buzz around him and learn the intimate details of his personal story, how loss and society's inequalities and constrictions spiraled towards this ghostly fate, with moments of beauty and grace just out of reach. A powerful masterwork from one of Japan's most brilliant outsider writers, Tokyo Ueno Station is a book for our times and a look into a marginalized existence in a shiny global megapolis

FINALISTS

The finalists were announced on October 6, 2020 and include the winner as well as the following titles.

High As the Waters Rise by Anja Kampmann
The Family Clause by Jonas Hassen Khemiri
The Bitch by Pilar Quintana
Minor Detail by Adania Shibli

High As the Waters Rise by Kampmann, Anja ; Anne Posten (Translator)
Call Number: FIC KAMPM ANJ H (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9781948226523
Publication Date: 2020-09-15
One night aboard an oil drilling platform in the Atlantic, Waclaw returns to his cabin to find that his bunkmate and companion, Mátyás, has gone missing. A search of the rig confirms his fear that Mátyás has fallen into the sea. Grief-stricken, he embarks on an epic emotional and physical journey that takes him to Morocco, to Budapest and Mátyás's hometown in Hungary, to Malta, Italy, and finally to the mining town of his childhood in Germany. Waclaw's encounters along the way with other lost and yearning souls - Mátyás's angry, grieving half-sister; lonely rig workers on shore leave; a truck driver who watches the world change from his driver's seat - bring us closer to his origins while also revealing the problems of a globalized economy dependent on waning natural resources. High as the Waters Rise is a stirring exploration of male intimacy, the nature of memory and grief, and the cost of freedom - the story of a man who stands at the margins of a society from which he has profited little, though its functioning depends on his labor.
The Family Clause : a novel by Khemiri, Jonas Hassen ; Alice Menzies (Translator)
Call Number: FIC KHEMI JONH F (Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780374134327
Publication Date: 2020-08-25
A grandfather who lives abroad returns home to Sweden to visit his adult children. The son is a failure. The daughter is having a baby with the wrong man. Only the grandfather is perfect-- at least, according to himself. Over the course of ten intense days relationships unfold and painful memories resurface. The grandfather is confronted by his past. The daughter is faced with an impossible choice. The son tries to write himself free. Per a longstanding family agreement, the grandfather has maintained his Swedish residency by coming to stay with his son every six months. Can this clause be renegotiated, or will it chain the family to its past forever?
The Bitch by Quintana, Pilar ; Lisa Dillman (Translator)
Call Number: FIC QUINT PIL BI (Adult fiction)
ISBN: 9781642860597
Publication Date: 2020-08-04
In Colombia's brutal jungle, childless Damaris develops an intense and ultimately doomed relationship with an orphaned puppy. Colombia's Pacific coast, where everyday life entails warding off the brutal forces of nature. In this constant struggle, nothing is taken for granted. Damaris lives with her fisherman husband in a shack on a bluff overlooking the sea. Childless and at that age 'when women dry up', as her uncle puts it, she is eager to adopt an orphaned puppy. But this act may bring more than just affection into her home.
Minor Detail by Shibli, Adania; Elisabeth Jaquette (Translator)
Call Number: FIC SHIBL ADA MI (Adult fiction)
ISBN: 9780811229074
Publication Date: 2020-05-26
Minor Detail begins during the summer of 1949, one year after the war that the Palestinians mourn as the Nakba-the catastrophe that led to the displacement and exile of some 700,000 people-and the Israelis celebrate as the War of Independence. Israeli soldiers murder an encampment of Bedouin in the Negev desert, and among their victims they capture a Palestinian teenager and they rape her, kill her, and bury her in the sand. Many years later, in the near-present day, a young woman in Ramallah tries to uncover some of the details surrounding this particular rape and murder, and becomes fascinated to the point of obsession, not only because of the nature of the crime, but because it was committed exactly twenty-five years to the day before she was born.

This Longlist was announced on September 16, 2020. Titles also include the winner and finalists listed above.

The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree by Shokoofeh Azar
The Helios Disaster by Linda Boström Knausgård
Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melcho
The Story of a Goat by Perumal Murugan
Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-joo

WINNER

King and the Dragonflies by Callender, Kacen
Call Number: Juv F CAL (Juvenile Fiction)
ISBN: 9781338129335
Publication Date: 2020-02-04
In a small but turbulent Louisiana town, one boy's grief takes him beyond the bayous of his backyard, to learn that there is no right way to be yourself.

FINALISTS

The finalists were announced on October 6, 2020 and include the winner noted above.

We Are Not Free by Traci Chee
Every Body Looking by Candice Iloh
When Stars Are Scattered by Omar Mohamed and Victoria Jamieson
The Way Back by Gavriel Savit

We Are Not Free by Chee, Traci
Call Number: YA F CHE-T (Young Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780358131434
Publication Date: 2020-09-01
For fourteen-year-old budding artist Minoru Ito, her two brothers, her friends, and the other members of the Japanese-American community in southern California, the three months since Pearl Harbor was attacked have become a waking nightmare: attacked, spat on, and abused with no way to retaliate--and now things are about to get worse, their lives forever changed by the mass incarcerations in the relocation camps.
Every Body Looking by Iloh, Candice
Call Number: YA F ILO-C (Young Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9780525556206
Publication Date: 2020-09-22
"Ada" means first daughter, means oldest girl, means most pressure. When Ada leaves home for her freshman year at a historical Black college, it's the first time that she's been able to make her own choices. As she stumbles deeper into the world of dance and explores her sexuality, she also begins to wrestle with her past-- her mother's struggle with addiction, her Nigerian father's attempts to make a home for her. Will she find the courage to shape a life of her own?
When Stars Are Scattered by Jamieson, Victoria (Illustrator); Omar Mohamed; Iman Geddy (Illustrator)
Call Number: Juv G MOH (Juvenile Graphic Books)
ISBN: 9780525553915
Publication Date: 2020-04-14
Omar and his younger brother Hassan live in a refugee camp, and when an opportunity for Omar to get an education comes along, he must decide between going to school every day or caring for his nonverbal brother in this intimate and touching portrayal of family and daily life in a refugee camp.
The Way Back by Savit, Gavriel
Call Number: YA F SAV-G (Young Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9781984894625
Publication Date: 2020-11-17
A historical fantasy that follows Eastern European teens Yehuda and Bluma on a journey through the Far Country, the Jewish land of the dead.

This Longlist was announced on September 16, 2020. The list originally included the finalists and winner as indicated above.

Lifting as We Climb : Black Women's Battle for the Ballot Box by Evette Dionne
Apple (Skin to the Core) by Eric Gansworth
Trowbridge Road by Marcella Pixley
How We Got to the Moon : the People, Technology, and Daring Feats of Science Behind Humanity's Greatest Adventure by John Rocco
Cemetery Boys by Aiden Thomas

Lifting As We Climb by Evette Dionne
Call Number: YA 323.3 DIO-E (Young adult nonfiction)
ISBN: 9780451481542
Publication Date: 2020-04-21
When the epic story of the suffrage movement in the United States is told, the most familiar leaders, speakers at meetings, and participants in marches written about or pictured are generally white. Dionne shows that the real story isn't monochromatic. Women of color, especially African American women, were fighting for their right to vote and to be treated as full, equal citizens of the United States. They had to overcome deep, exclusionary racial prejudices that were rife in the American suffrage movement. Dionne draws an important historical line from abolition to suffrage to civil rights to contemporary young activists, and in doing so fills in the blanks of the American suffrage story.
Apple : skin to the core : a memoir in words and pictures by Eric Gansworth
Call Number: YA B GAN-E (Young Adult Biography)
ISBN: 9781646140138
Publication Date: 2020-10-06
The term "Apple" is a slur in Native communities across the country. It's for someone supposedly "red on the outside, white on the inside." Eric Gansworth is telling his story in Apple (Skin to the Core). The story of his family, of Onondaga among Tuscaroras, of Native folks everywhere. From the horrible legacy of the government boarding schools, to a boy watching his siblings leave and return and leave again, to a young man fighting to be an artist who balances multiple worlds. Eric shatters that slur and reclaims it in verse and prose and imagery that truly lives up to the word heartbreaking.
Trowbridge Road by Pixley, Marcella
Call Number: Juv F PIX (Juvenile Fiction)
ISBN: 9781536207507
Publication Date: 2020-10-06
It's the summer of '83 on Trowbridge Road, and June Bug Jordan is hungry. Months after her father's death from complications from AIDS, her mother has stopped cooking and refuses to leave the house, instead locking herself away to scour at the germs she believes are everywhere. June Bug threatens this precarious existence by going out into the neighborhood, gradually befriending an imaginative boy who is living with his Nana Jean after experiencing troubles of his own. But as June Bug's connection to the world grows stronger, her mother's grows more distant - even dangerous - pushing June Bug to choose between truth and healing and the only home she has ever known.
How We Got to the Moon by John Rocco
Call Number: Juv 629.45 ROC (Juvenile Nonfiction)
ISBN: 9780525647416
Publication Date: 2020-10-06
This beautifully illustrated, oversized guide to the people and technology of the moon landing by award-winning author/illustrator John Rocco is a must-have for space fans, classrooms, and tech geeks.
Cemetery Boys by Thomas, Aiden
Call Number: YA F THO-A (Young Adult Fiction)
ISBN: 9781250250469
Publication Date: 2020-09-01
When his traditional Latinx family has problems accepting his gender, Yadriel becomes determined to prove himself a real brujo. With the help of his cousin and best friend Maritza, he performs the ritual himself, and then sets out to find the ghost of his murdered cousin and set it free. But the ghost he summons is actually Julian Diaz, the school's resident bad boy, and Julian is determined to find out what happened-- and tie up some loose ends before he leaves. Left with no choice, Yadriel agrees to help Julian. But the longer Yadriel spends with Julian, the less he wants to let him leave.

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