Honor roll:National Book Award for Fiction

The Corrections

Jonathan Franzen

• 2002 JT Black-Fiction winner
• 2001 NBA–Fiction winner
• 2003 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
• 2002 PEN-faulkner finalist
• 2002 Pulitzer–fiction finalist
• 2001 LATimes–Fiction finalist
• 2001 NBCC–Fiction finalist
• Score: 50.52

Enid Lambert is terribly, terribly anxious. Although she would never admit it to her neighbors or her three grown children, her husband, Alfred, is losing his grip on reality. Maybe it’s the medication that Alfred takes for his Parkinson’s disease, or maybe it’s his negative attitude, but he spends his days brooding in the basement and committing shadowy, unspeakable acts. More and more often, he doesn’t seem to understand a word Enid says.

Trouble is also brewing in the lives of Enid’s children. Her older son, Gary, a banker in Philadelphia, has turned cruel…

The March: A Novel

E.L. Doctorow

• 2006 PEN-faulkner winner
• 2005 NBCC–Fiction winner
• 2006 Pulitzer–fiction finalist
• 2005 LATimes–Fiction finalist
• 2005 NBA–Fiction finalist
• Score: 38.56

In 1864, after Union general William Tecumseh Sherman burned Atlanta, he marched his sixty thousand troops east through Georgia to the sea, and then up into the Carolinas. The army fought off Confederate forces and lived off the land, pillaging the Southern plantations, taking cattle and crops for their own, demolishing cities, and accumulating a borne-along population of freed blacks and white refugees until all that remained was the dangerous transient life of the uprooted, the dispossessed, and the triumphant. Only a master novelist could so powerfully and…

The Known World

Edward P. Jones

• 2005 IMPAC Dublin winner
• 2004 Pulitzer–fiction winner
• 2003 NBCC–Fiction winner
• 2003 NBA–Fiction finalist
• Score: 36.55

Henry Townsend, a black farmer, bootmaker, and former slave, has a fondness for Paradise Lost and an unusual mentor—William Robbins, perhaps the most powerful man in antebellum Virginia’s Manchester County. Under Robbins’s tutelage, Henry becomes proprietor of his own plantation—as well as of his own slaves. When he dies, his widow, Caldonia, succumbs to profound grief, and things begin to fall apart at their plantation: slaves take to escaping under the cover of night, and families who had once found love beneath the weight of slavery begin to betray one…

A Flag for Sunrise

Robert Stone

• 1982 LATimes–Fiction winner
• 1982 NBA–Fiction finalist
• 1982 PEN-faulkner finalist
• 1982 Pulitzer–fiction finalist
• 1981 NBCC–Fiction finalist
• Score: 34.32

An emotional, dramatic and philosophical novel about Americans drawn into a small Central American country on the brink of revolution.

Waiting

Ha Jin

• 2000 PEN-faulkner winner
• 1999 NBA–Fiction winner
• 2000 Pulitzer–fiction finalist
• 1999 LATimes–Fiction finalist
• Score: 32.5

This is the story of Lin Kong, a man living in two worlds, struggling with the conflicting claims of two utterly different women as he moves through the political minefields of a society designed to regulate his every move and stifle the promptings of his innermost heart.

For more than seventeen years, this devoted and ambitious doctor has been in love with an educated, clever, modern woman, Manna Wu. But back in the traditional world of his home village lives the wife his family chose for him when he was young—a humble and touchingly loyal woman, whom he…

Billy Bathgate

E.L. Doctorow

• 1990 PEN-faulkner winner
• 1989 NBCC–Fiction winner
• 1990 Pulitzer–fiction finalist
• 1989 NBA–Fiction finalist
• Score: 32.4

In 1930’s New York, Billy Bathgate, a fifteen-year-old high-school dropout, has captured the attention of infamous gangster Dutch Schultz, who lures the boy into his world of racketeering. The product of an East Bronx upbringing by his half-crazy Irish Catholic mother, after his Jewish father left them long ago, Billy is captivated by the world of money, sex, and high society the charismatic Schultz has to offer. But it is also a world of extortion, brutality, and murder, where Billy finds himself involved in a dangerous affair with Schultz’s girlfriend. Relive…

Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant: A Novel

Anne Tyler

• 1983 NBA–Fiction finalist
• 1983 PEN-faulkner finalist
• 1983 Pulitzer–fiction finalist
• 1982 LATimes–Fiction finalist
• 1982 NBCC–Fiction finalist
• Score: 30.33

Pearl Tull is nearing the end of her life but not her memory. Ever since 1944 when her husband left her, she has raised her three very different children on her own. Now grown, they have gathered together—with anger, with hope, and with a beautiful, harsh, and dazzling story to tell….

Rabbit Is Rich

John Updike

• 1982 NBA–Fiction winner
• 1982 Pulitzer–fiction winner
• 1981 NBCC–Fiction winner
• Score: 30.32

The hero of John Updike’s Rabbit, Run (1960), ten years after the hectic events described in Rabbit Redux (1971), has come to enjoy considerable prosperity as Chief Sales Representative of Springer Motors, a Toyota agency in Brewer, Pennsylvania. The time is 1979: Skylab is falling, gas lines are lengthening, the President collapses while running in a marathon, and double-digit inflation coincides with a deflation of national confidence. Nevertheless, Harry Angstrom feels in good shape, ready to enjoy life at last—until his son, Nelson, returns from…

The Stories of John Cheever

John Cheever

• 1981 NBA–Fiction winner
• 1979 Pulitzer–fiction winner
• 1978 NBCC–Fiction winner
• Score: 30.31

Here are sixty-one stories that chronicle the lives of what has been called “the greatest generation.” From the early wonder and disillusionment of city life in “The Enormous Radio” to the surprising discoveries and common mysteries of suburbia in “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill” and “The Swimmer,” Cheever tells us everything we need to know about “the pain and sweetness of life.”

The Great Fire: A Novel

Shirley Hazzard

• 2003 NBA–Fiction winner
• 2005 IMPAC Dublin shortlist
• 2004 Kiriyama-Fiction finalist
• 2004 Orange shortlist
• Score: 28.53

The Great Fire is Shirley Hazzard’s first novel since The Transit of Venus, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1981. The conflagration of her title is the Second World War. In war-torn Asia and stricken Europe, men and women, still young but veterans of harsh experience, must reinvent their lives and expectations, and learn, from their past, to dream again. Some will fulfill their destinies, others will falter. At the center of the story, a brave and brilliant soldier finds that survival and worldly achievement are not enough. His…