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Discover Great New Writers
Previous Winners


2005 Fiction Winner

Book Cover Image Beasts of No Nation
by Uzodinma Iweala
Our Price: $9.56



   Second Place: Pigtopia
   Third Place: Tenney's Landing


2005 Nonfiction Winner

Book Cover Image One Bullet Away
by Nathaniel Fick
Our Price: $11.96



   Second Place: The Tricky Part
   Third Place: The Dancing Girls of Lahore


2004 Fiction Winner

Book Cover Image Heaven Lake
by John Dalton
Our Price: $14.95



   Second Place: The Hamilton Case
   Third Place: How the Light Gets In


2004 Nonfiction Winner

Book Cover Image Name All the Animals
by Alison Smith
Our Price: $14.20



   Second Place: Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found
   Third Place: Blue Blood


2003 Fiction Winner

Book Cover Image Brick Lane
by Monica Ali
Our Price: $12.00

Monica Ali's virtuoso debut carries readers into a world unknown to most Americans: the sheltered life of a deeply traditional Muslim housewife.

   Second Place: What Was She Thinking? Notes on a Scandal
   Third Place: How to Breathe Underwater: Stories


2003 Nonfiction Winner

Book Cover Image A Sideways Look at Time
by Jay Griffiths
Our Price: $15.15

The author's shrewdly researched work explores our complicated, often unsatisfying relationship with time and provides a deeply fascinating read.

   Second Place: The Sewing Cirles of Herat
   Third Place: In the Shadow of Memory


2002 Fiction Winner

Book Cover Image The Shell Collector: Stories
by Anthony Doerr
Our Price: $14.25

This accomplished and enchanting story collection, traversing terrain from the African coast to the American West, explores man's relationship to the natural world.

   Second Place: When the Emperor Was Divine
   Third Place: The Lovely Bones


2002 Nonfiction Winner

Book Cover Image A Death in Texas: A Story of Race, Murder and a Small Town's Struggle for Redemption
by Dina Temple-Raston
Our Price: $15.00

A horrific but powerfully important journalistic account of the 1998 dragging death of James Byrd, Jr., A Death in Texas is, in its way, as much a classic as Truman Capote's In Cold Blood.

   Second Place: Diamond
   Third Place: Local Wonders


2001 Fiction Winner

Book Cover Image The Death of Vishnu
by Manil Suri
Our Price: $13.95

Manil Suri's comic prose and imaginative language transport readers to contemporary India, where an aging alcoholic houseboy named Vishnu lies penniless on the bottom step of a middle-class Bombay apartment house, facing his impending death placidly and philosophically amid a maelstrom of petty squabbles and unrelenting conflicts.

   Second Place: Peace like a River
   Third Place: Observatory Mansions


2001 Nonfiction Winner

Book Cover Image Ghost Soldiers
The Forgotten Epic Story of World War II's Most Dramatic Mission
by Hampton Sides
Our Price: $23.96

Hampton Sides masterfully documents one of the most haunting stories of the Second World War in the Pacific: the horrors faced by British and American POWs struggling to stay alive at Cabanatuan as survivors of the hideous Bataan Death March -- and the heroic tale of their liberation.

   Second Place: Seabiscuit
   Third Place: River Town


The 2000 Winner

Book Cover Image Girl with a Pearl Earring
by Tracy Chevalier
Our Price: $11.20

Young Greit, paralyzed by the strict social order of seventeenth-century Delft, becomes a maid in the household of the famous Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer to support her family. As Greit witnesses the creative process of a great artist, her long-suppressed passion becomes the catalyst for a scandal that irrevocably changes her life.


The 1999 Winner

Book Cover Image The Pleasing Hour
by Lily King
Our Price: $13.00

A mature and accomplished first novel, THE PLEASING HOUR is about the choices we must live with long after we make them. Through Nicole and Rosie, love and the fragile ties of family-both real and adopted-are depicted in all their complicated and frangible beauty in this intelligent and wonderfully crafted debut.


The 1998 Winner

Book Cover Image Rose's Garden
by Carrie Brown
Our Price: $20.95

In this graceful debut, Carrie Brown undertakes the difficult task of telling a beautifully sentimental story in a simple and believable way.

Seventy-five-year-old Conrad has spent the last four months since his beloved wife's death in a crippling depression. He was married to his Rose for more than 50 years, and theirs was a true love match that grew more intense with the passage of time. Conrad has neglected not only himself during these months of grieving but also Rose's beloved garden.

A deeply moving tale of love and human strength, ROSE'S GARDEN is as magical as the appearance of the first buds of spring.


The 1997 Winner

Book Cover Image The Light of Falling Stars
by J. Robert Lennon
Our Price: $13.00

Paul and Anita are struggling. Struggling with their finances, with Paul's work, and with their marriage. They are in the process of yet another argument when a plane lands in their yard, taking a corner of their house along with it. Though Paul and Anita remain at the center of the story, it is the plane crash that connects the many characters populating Lennon's powerful debut, bringing together a cross section of humanity worthy of Victor Hugo. In the voices of a grandmother, a slacker, an Italian grocer, and a troubled couple, the subtleties that make up a life are explored with profound sensitivity and insight. It is in these lives, glimpsed as if through a telescope, that we see each of these characters anxiously anticipating the arrival of Flight 114 and then, after the crash, gingerly picking up the pieces of their shattered lives, waiting for loved ones who will never appear. Read an interview with the author.


The 1996 Winner

Book Cover Image The Giant's House
by Elizabeth McCracken
Our Price: $13.00

THE GIANT'S HOUSE is the poignant love story of Peggy Cort, the town librarian of Brewsterville, Massachusetts, and the tallest boy in the world. Peggy first notices the "overtall" James Carlson Sweatt during his grade school class field trip to the library. Already six foot two at the age of 12, James will continue to grow: to seven and a half feet at 16, to eight foot seven at 20. James becomes a frequent visitor to the library, and with her librarian's love for taking care of things, Peggy cannot help but be intrigued by the lonely, inquisitive boy. As the friendship between this odd couple develops, the unexpectedness of this unlikely romance challenges all traditional ideas we may have about love.


The 1995 Winner

Book Cover Image Native Speaker
by Chang-rae Lee
Our Price: $12.00

When espionage agent Henry Park is assigned to spy on a fellow Korean American, he finds himself unexpectedly unable to carry out his job. Mixing compelling intrigue with insightful musings on family, love, and society, this debut novel offers a probing look at the complexities of cultural identity.


The 1994 Winner

Book Cover Image Snow Falling on Cedars
by David Guterson
Our Price: $12.00

At once a murder mystery, a courtroom drama, the story of a doomed love affair, and a stirring meditation on place, prejudice, and justice, SNOW FALLING ON CEDARS is an innovative literary masterpiece set among the internment camps constructed to hold Japanese Americans in the aftermath of World War II.


The 1993 Winner

Book Cover Image A Place Where the Sea Remembers
by Sandra Benitez
Our Price: $12.30

This poetic novel set in a small Mexican village focuses on several lives and relationships, including those of the salad-maker, the chambermaid, the paper-flower seller, and the bird man. Sandra Benitez paints a portrait that is contemporary yet timeless, proving her talent as both a compelling storyteller and a lyrical poet.