Book awards grow like weeds, but that is not a bad thing. Acclaim (or at least recognition) is a way to find out about the notable, the rare, the special in the vast flood of books. Over the years we have discovered that some awards are more trustworthy or more relevant to our customers than others. The award winners and sometimes the nominees are featured here. A quick explanation:
the Caldecott Medal is intended for the best illustrated children’s book,
the Newbery Medal is intended for the best young adult book (flexible in definition),
the National Book Award is given by the National Book Foundation,
the National Book Critics’ Circle Award by a professional association of American book review editors and critics (originally the Algonquin Round Table),
the Edgar Award by the Mystery Writers of America,
the Hugo Award by the yearly World Science Fiction Convention (professional affiliation not required),
the Nebula by the Science Fiction Writers of America,
the Spur Award by the Western Writers of America,
the Booker Prize by a changing committee of eminent UK writers and critics,
and the Pulitzer Prize by Columbia University as endowed by newspaperman Joseph Pulitzer.
As a reminder, the Nobel Prize for Literature is for a lifetime body of work, not for a single work in a particular year, as are all the others featured here.
The Overstory
The Overstory
New York Times Bestseller
Shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize
A New York Times Notable, Washington Post, Time, Oprah Magazine, Newsweek, Chicago Tribune, and Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2018
A monumental novel about trees and people by one of our most "prodigiously talented" (The New York Times Book Review) novelists.
An Air Force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light. A hearing- and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another. These four, and five other strangers—each summoned in different ways by trees—are brought together in a last and violent stand to save the continent’s few remaining acres of virgin forest.
In his twelfth novel, National Book Award winner Richard Powers delivers a sweeping, impassioned novel of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of—and paean to—the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, The Overstory unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond, exploring the essential conflict on this planet: the one taking place between humans and nonhumans. There is a world alongside ours—vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.
The Overstory is a book for all readers who despair of humanity’s self-imposed separation from the rest of creation and who hope for the transformative, regenerating possibility of a homecoming. If the trees of this earth could speak, what would they tell us? "Listen. There’s something you need to hear."