"2010 WINNER. A tinker is a mender, and in Harding’s spellbinding debut, he imagines the old, mendable horse-and-carriage world. The objects of the past were more readily repaired than our electronics."
"2010 finalist. Lions, Komodo dragons, dogs, monkeys, and pheasants — all have shared spotlights and tabloid headlines with celebrities such as Sharon Stone, Thomas Edison, and David Hasselhoff."
"2010 finalist. In eight beautifully crafted, interconnected stories, Mueenuddin explores the cutthroat feudal society in which a rich Lahore landowner is entrenched. A complicated network of patronage"
"2009 WINNER. “Hell. We’re always alone. Born alone. Die alone,” says Olive Kitteridge, redoubtable seventh-grade math teacher in Crosby, Maine. Anyone who gets in Olive’s way had better watch out..."
"2009 finalist. Popular Astra Dell spends much of her senior year in the hospital with a rare form of tissue cancer. A young teacher visits Astra and considers her own brother, who died young."
"2009 finalist. “Every so often something shatters like ice and we are in the river of our existence. We are aware.” Those are the moments Erdrich captures in this mesmerizing novel set in Pluto, ND."
"2008 WINNER. The titular Oscar is a 300-pound-plus "lovesick ghetto nerd" with zero game who cranks out pages of fantasy fiction with the hopes of becoming a Dominican Tolkien."
"2008 finalist. Filled with all the pomp and depressed glory of a modern-day Great Gatsby, each installment delivers an entertaining glimpse into the dysfunctional lives of a group of hoity-toity..."
"2008 finalist. If this novel, Johnson's first in nearly a decade, is-as the promo copy says-about Skip Sands, it's also about his uncle, a legendary CIA operative; Kathy Jones, a widowed, saintly..."
"2007 WINNER. Violence, in McCarthy's postapocalyptic tour de force, has been visited worldwide in the form of a "long shear of light and then a series of low concussions" that leaves cities and..."
"2007 finalist. Adult/High School—John and Mary Keane, good Irish Catholics raising four children and sharing their lively family with a spinster "aunt," feel the impact of the 1960s on their family."
"2007 finalist. Addresses the question of how we know who we really are. Mark, who repairs machinery at a meat-processing plant, suffers a head injury that prevents him from recognizing his sister."
"2006 WINNER. Brooks's luminous second novel, after 2001's acclaimed Year of Wonders, imagines the Civil War experiences of Mr. March, the absent father in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women."
"2006 finalist. Multiple voices piece together a tragedy with its own slippery backstory. On a summer evening in an "itty-bitty" Indiana town in the 70s, nine-year-old Katie Mackey rides her bicycle..."
"2006 finalist. As the Civil War was moving toward its inevitable conclusion, General Sherman marched 60,000 Union troops through Georgia and the Carolinas, leaving a 60-mile-wide trail of death..."
