Top 10 Award Winners You May Have Missed
The Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Fiction (2021)
Deacon King Kong
by James McBride

National Book Award–winner McBride (Five-Carat Soul, 2017) portrays a 1969 Brooklyn neighborhood through its outsiders, from the Irish to Italians, Puerto Ricans, and African Americans who came north during the Great Migration. At 71, the titular deacon is the least likely of heroes; residents of the Cause Houses wonder how he's still alive. Barely coherent, Cuffy "Sportcoat" Lambkin rehearses for arguments with his late wife, Hettie, and drinks to "clear his thoughts," running off to the boiler room to down some King Kong, a local white lightning, usually with his best friend, Hot Sausage. When he shoots Deems Clemens, the boy he coached in baseball who has become a drug-dealer at 19, everyone assumes the deacon's days of freedom are numbered. But all is not as it seems. As the deacon begins to reckon with his past, he also protects the young man's future and brings some stability to his community. McBride creates tragedies, funny moments, major plot twists, and cultural and generational clashes. A sense of shared struggle emerges as diverse characters develop emotionally while navigating a world that's changing for better and for worse. While historical fiction fans will appreciate the richly detailed approach to Brooklyn's grittiness, McBride's neighborhood saga ultimately sets a new standard for multidimensional fiction about people of color.
The Bram Stoke Award for Superior Achievement in a Novel (2020)
The Only Good Indians
by Stephen Graham Jones

With a lengthy bibliography full of titles like Mongrels (2016) and After the People Lights Have Gone Off (2014), Jones has proven his horror mettle, but his latest novel steers the genre into some unexpected territory. When a group of young friends hunt elk on a section of land set aside for Blackfoot tribal elders, they set into motion a vengeance that will shadow the rest of their lives. Even fleeing the desperation of the reservation doesn't save them from the consequences of their act. One by one, they're stalked by a supernatural force that sprang into being on the night of the hunt. The Only Good Indians certainly brings the requisite genre shocks, but also functions as a serious look at modern Native American culture, both inside and outside the reservation. These themes make the book weightier than typical scare fare and, while some of the shifts in narrative focus feel abrupt, the overall work is very impactful. A solid tale about a community that hasn't often received serious treatment in the horror genre.
The Edgar Award for Best Novel (2021)
Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line: A Novel
by Deepa Anappara

Enamored of police reality shows, nine-year-old Jai decides to become a detective himself when a classmate goes missing from his impoverished urban Indian settlement. Hoping to solve the case, he enlists the aid of his two best friends, Faiz and Pari. Their mettle is tested when other children begin disappearing, and the corrupt local police ignore the situation. Faiz, a Muslim, is convinced that an evil djinn is responsible, while Pari pooh-poohs that notion and Jai equivocates. But if not a djinn, then who or what? Clearly something evil is at work as more and more children disappear; finally, even Jai's older sister becomes a victim. Jai bitterly decides he's not a detective after all, and even the solution of the mystery fails to bring him closure. The author has done an excellent job of telling her sometimes sad story in Jai's credible nine-year-old voice, and her treatment of her setting, with its ingrained social inequities, is a model of verisimilitude. Best, however, is her characterization, especially that of Jai, who comes to life on the page to live on in readers' memories.
The James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction (2020)
Ducks, Newburyport
by Lucy Ellmann

Ellmann tells a tale of two mothers. One is a magnificent mountain lion whose brief, increasingly dramatic appearances are rendered in lyrical sentences and paragraphs that surface intermittently like stepping-stones within a deluge of consciousness conveying the tumbling thoughts of a forty-something human mother of four in Ohio. Her Niagara of memories, worries, observations, and self-criticisms surge across the novel's many pages in one audaciously long sentence, achieving an incantatory cadence based on the refrain "the fact that" ("the fact that I seem to fall in love during family crises, first Chuck, then Leo, the fact that Frank doesn't count, the fact that I tried to love him"). Ellmann's smart, hilarious, high-strung narrator—a former history teacher, a caterer specializing in pies, and a cancer survivor—ruminates over food, family, extinction, the Native American genocide, nuclear waste, movies, Laura Ingalls Wilder, school shootings, racism, Trump, plastic-filled oceans, and polluted rivers. She adores her engineer husband and mourns for her mother, to whom the title obliquely refers. As the mountain lion's natural idyll is destroyed, forcing her on a desperate odyssey, her human counterpoint and her children also come under siege. Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Ellmann's mesmerizing, witty, maximalist (think David Foster Wallace, William T. Vollmann), and maddening performance is a bravura and caring inquiry into Earth's glory, human creativity and catastrophic recklessness, and the transcendence of love. 
The Man Booker Prize (2020)
Shuggie Bain
by Douglas Stuart

Shuggie Bain is the unforgettable story of young Hugh "Shuggie" Bain, a sweet and lonely boy who spends his 1980s childhood in run-down public housing in Glasgow, Scotland. Thatcher's policies have put husbands and sons out of work, and the city's notorious drugs epidemic is waiting in the wings. Shuggie's mother Agnes walks a wayward path: she is Shuggie's guiding light but a burden for him and his siblings. She dreams of a house with its own front door while she flicks through the pages of the Freemans catalogue, ordering a little happiness on credit, anything to brighten up her grey life. Married to a philandering taxi-driver husband, Agnes keeps her pride by looking good--her beehive, make-up, and pearly-white false teeth offer a glamorous image of a Glaswegian Elizabeth Taylor. But under the surface, Agnes finds increasing solace in drink, and she drains away the lion's share of each week's benefits--all the family has to live on--on cans of extra-strong lager hidden in handbags and poured into tea mugs. Agnes's older children find their own ways to get a safe distance from their mother, abandoning Shuggie to care for her as she swings between alcoholic binges and sobriety. Shuggie is meanwhile struggling to somehow become the normal boy he desperately longs to be, but everyone has realized that he is "no right," a boy with a secret that all but him can see. Agnes is supportive of her son, but her addiction has the power to eclipse everyone close to her--even her beloved Shuggie. A heartbreaking story of addiction, sexuality, and love, Shuggie Bain is an epic portrayal of a working-class family that is rarely seen in fiction. Recalling the work of Édouard Louis, Alan Hollinghurst, Frank McCourt, and Hanya Yanagihara, it is a blistering debut by a brilliant novelist who has a powerful and important story to tell.
The National Book Award for Fiction (2020)
Leave the World Behind: A Novel
by Rumaan Alam

Amanda and Craig and their children, Archie and Rose, hope to leave their troubles behind as they vacation in a remote Long Island cottage. But the world has a way of finding you. Barely a day into their vacation, the house's owners come knocking. Panicked by a total blackout in Manhattan, where they usually reside, Ruth and G. H. are seeking refuge in their other home. As if to confirm the couple's unease, unsettling events—flamingos flying in the woods, an earth-shattering noise invading the saturated summer silence—transpire. As they do, Alam (That Kind of Mother, 2018) brilliantly captures the shift in dynamics between the two families, from apprehension about each other to a collective front against an external entity. The narrative's increasing tempo expertly dives into subtle yet incisive intersections between class and race, since the vacationers are white, and G. H. and Ruth are Black. Alam's novel lobs a series of unsettling questions: How will we react to the next nebulous horror? How will we parent? What will we define as home? "Home was just where you were, in the end. It was just the place where you found yourself," thinks Rose. In a world constantly on edge, this will have to pass for consolation. 
The National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction (2020)
Hamnet: A Novel of the Plaque
by Maggie O'Farrell

How were they to know that Hamnet was the pin holding them together?" One ordinary afternoon in 1596, 11-year-old Hamnet's twin sister, Judith, is suddenly taken ill as the Black Death stalks Stratford's lanes. Hamnet's father is, as always, away in London. His mother, skilled with herbs and possessing a numinous second sight, recognizes she will lose one of her children. Yet even she is shocked when it is not Judith who dies, but Hamnet. Historical sources on Agnes (aka Anne) Hathaway Shakespeare are few, so O'Farrell's imagination freely ranges in this tale of deepest love and loss. Flashbacks document the Shakespeares' marriage; O'Farrell offering a gentler rendering than the traditional view. While Hamnet's death inspires aspects of Hamlet, Shakespeare is not the foremost player here ("He is all head, that one. All head, with not much sense."); rather, it is Agnes, vibrant, uncannily perceptive, who takes center stage. While O'Farrell encapsulates atmosphere through small sensory details—golden honey dripping from a comb, the smell of lavender sprinkled into a vat of soap—she is laser-focused on human connections, their ebb and flow, and how they can drown a person. This striking, painfully lovely novel captures the very nature of grief. 
The Nebula Award for Best Novel (2020)
Network Effect
by Martha Wells

 Everyone's favorite Murderbot is now working as a security consultant for Preservation Station. While accompanying several members of Dr. Mensah's family on a research outing, they're attacked by a ship that looks a lot like their old friend, the transport ship ART. Murderbot and Amena, Mensah's daughter, are kidnapped and taken aboard, where they uncover a plot that leads back to a strange planet, corporate machinations, and a possible alien contagion. The Murderbot novellas were perfectly paced to fit a ton of action into a short form. Network Effect is just as action-packed, but the pace is now calibrated to fill a full novel, which gives it more breathing room and opportunities to explore the characters and the setting in greater depth. Relationships between all the characters are richer and more nuanced. Wells reveals more about Dr. Mensah's family and some surprises about ART and establishes more details about how the Corporations function, the contrasts between the Corporate Rim and Preservation Station, the politics at play, and some of the history of pre-Corporate planetary colonization attempts. It's a welcome expansion of this universe and lays the groundwork for more stories to come in a series that continues to grow and impress. 
The Orwell Prize for Political Fiction (2020)
The Nickel Boys
by Colson Whitehead

There were rumors about Nickel Academy, a Florida reform school, but survivors kept their traumas to themselves until a university archaeology student discovered the secret graveyard. Whitehead follows his dynamic, highly awarded, best-selling Civil War saga, The Underground Railroad (2016), with a tautly focused and gripping portrait of two African American teens during the last vicious years of Jim Crow. There is no way Elwood Curtis would ever have become a Nickel Boy if he was white. Raised by his strict grandmother, Elwood, who cherishes his album of recorded Martin Luther King Jr. speeches, is an exemplary student who earns admission to early college classes. But trouble whips up out of thin air, and instead he is sent to Nickel, where the Black boys are barely fed, classes are a travesty, and the threat of sexual abuse and torture is endemic. As Elwood tries to emulate Dr. King's teachings of peace and forgiveness, he is befriended by the more worldly and pragmatic Turner, and together they try to expose the full extent of the brazenly racist, sadistic, sometimes fatal crimes against the Nickel Boys. Whitehead's magnetic characters exemplify stoicism and courage, and each supremely crafted scene smolders and flares with injustice and resistance, building to a staggering revelation. Inspired by an actual school, Whitehead's potently concentrated drama pinpoints the brutality and insidiousness of Jim Crow racism with compassion and protest.
The Women's Prize for Fiction (2021)
Piranesi
by Susanna Clarke

In her highly distilled and rarefied first novel since her Hugo Award–winning debut, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004), Clarke posits another dynamic between a seeming mentor and mentee. But the realm in which their increasingly suspect relationship unspools is a bizarre and baffling one that we encounter through the journals kept by Clarke's earnest, spiritually creative narrator. He doesn't think Piranesi is his name, but that's what he's called by the older man he dubs the Other because he believes they are the only two people left alive. The actual Piranesi was an eighteenth-century Italian artist who created etchings of monumental and menacing architectural labyrinths, and, indeed, the exceedingly strange world Clarke has invented for her Piranesi, a self-described scientist and explorer, is a vast maze inexplicably populated by birds and gigantic statues and through which tides rise and fall, smashing against the walls. Threadbare Piranesi lives a spare, precarious existence, a noble innocent who believes that he has "a duty to bear witness to the splendors of the World," while the Other, clearly prosperous and busy tapping at his "shining device," is obsessed with seizing the power of "Great and Secret Knowledge." As questions multiply and suspense mounts in this spellbinding, occult puzzle of a fable, one begins to wonder if perhaps the reverence, kindness, and gratitude practiced by Clarke's enchanting and resilient hero aren't all the wisdom one truly needs.
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