National Book Award for Fiction

awarded since 1950.

 

2012 selection

The Round House

National Book Award for Fiction 2012

by Louise Erdrich

National Book Award Winner

One Sunday in the spring of 1988, a woman living on a reservation in North Dakota is attacked. The details of the crime are slow to surface as Geraldine Coutts is traumatized and reluctant...


2011 selection

Salvage the Bones

National Book Award for Fiction 2011

by Jesmyn Ward

Winner of the 2011 National Book Award for Fiction.

A hurricane is building over the Gulf of Mexico, threatening the coastal town of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, and Esch's father is growing concerned. A hard drinker,...


2009 selection

Let the Great World Spin: A Novel

International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award 2011, National Book Award for Fiction 2009

by Colum Mccann

In the dawning light of a late-summer morning, the people of lower Manhattan stand hushed, staring up in disbelief at the Twin Towers. It is August 1974, and a mysterious tightrope walker is running, dancing,...


2008 selection

Shadow Country

National Book Award for Fiction 2008

by Peter Matthiessen

2008 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER

Peter Matthiessen’s great American epic–Killing Mister Watson, Lost Man’s River, and Bone by Bone–was conceived as one vast mysterious novel, but because of its length...


2007 selection

Tree of Smoke

National Book Award for Fiction 2007

by Denis Johnson

Once upon a time there was a war . . . and a young American who thought of himself as the Quiet American and the Ugly American, and who wished to be neither, who wanted instead to be the Wise American, or the...


2006 selection

The Echo Maker

National Book Award for Fiction 2006

by Richard Powers

On a winter night on a remote Nebraska road, 27-year-old Mark Schluter flips his truck in a near-fatal accident. His older sister Karin, his only near kin, returns reluctantly to their hometown to nurse Mark...


2005 selection

Europe Central

National Book Award for Fiction 2005

by William Vollmann

In his magnficent new work of fiction —which reviewers have greeted with such words as "profound," "easily his greatest work," "morally significant" — acclaimed author William T. Vollmann turns his trenchant...


2004 selection

The News from Paraguay

National Book Award for Fiction 2004

by Lily Tuck

The year is l854. In Paris, Francisco Solano -- the future dictator of Paraguay -- begins his courtship of the young, beautiful Irish courtesan Ella Lynch with a poncho, a Paraguayan band, and ahorse named Mathilde....


2003 selection

The Great Fire

National Book Award for Fiction 2003

by Shirley Hazzard

A great writer's sweeping story of men and women struggling to reclaim their lives in the aftermath of world conflict     The Great Fire is Shirley Hazzard's first novel since The Transit of Venus, which...


2002 selection

Three Junes: A novel

National Book Award for Fiction 2002

by Julia Glass

An astonishing first novel that traces the lives of a Scottish family over a decade as they confront the joys and longings, fulfillments and betrayals of love in all its guises.

In June of 1989 Paul McLeod,...


2001 selection

The Corrections

James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction 2002, National Book Award for Fiction 2001

by Jonathan Franzen

Winner of the 2001 National Book Award for Fiction

Nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award

An American Library Association Notable Book

Jonathan Franzen's third novel, The Corrections, is a great work...


2000 selection

In America

National Book Award for Fiction 2000

by Susan Sontag

A glorious, sweeping new novel from the bestselling author of The Volcano Lover.

The Volcano Lover, Susan Sontag's bestselling 1992 novel, retold the love story of Emma Lady Hamilton and Lord Nelson with consummate...


1999 selection

Waiting

PEN/Faulkner 2000, National Book Award for Fiction 1999

by Ha Jin

"In Waiting, Ha Jin portrays the life of Lin Kong, a dedicated doctor torn by his love for two women: one who belongs to the New China of the Cultural Revolution, the other to the ancient traditions of his family's...


1998 selection

Charming Billy

National Book Award for Fiction 1998

by Alice Mcdermott

Alice McDermott tells the story of Billy Lynch within the complex matrix of a tightly knit Irish American community, in a voice that is resonant and full of deep feeling. Charming Billy is a masterpiece about...


1995 selection

Sabbath's Theater

National Book Award for Fiction 1995

by Philip Roth

He is relentlessly defiant. He is exceedingly libidinous. His appetite for the outrageous is insatiable. He is Mickey Sabbath, the aging, raging powerhouse whose savage effrontery and mocking audacity are at...


1993 selection

The Shipping News: A Novel

Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 1994, National Book Award for Fiction 1993

by Annie Proulx

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, The Shipping News is a celebration of Annie Proulx's genius for storytelling and her vigorous contribution to the art of the novel.

Quoyle, a third-rate...


1992 selection

All the Pretty Horses

National Book Award for Fiction 1992

by Cormac Mccarthy

Now a major motion picture from Columbia Pictures starring Matt Damon, produced by Mike Nichols, and directed by Billy Bob Thornton.

The national bestseller and the first volume in Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy...


1991 selection

Mating: A Novel

National Book Award for Fiction 1991

by Norman Rush

The narrator of this splendidly expansive novel of high intellect and grand passion is an American anthropologist at loose ends in the South African republic of Botswana. She has a noble and exacting mind, a...


1990 selection

Middle Passage

National Book Award for Fiction 1990

by Charles Johnson

It is 1830. Rutherford Calhoun, a newly treed slave and irrepressible rogue, is desperate to escape unscrupulous bill collectors and an impending marriage to a priggish schoolteacher. He jumps aboard the first...


1987 selection

Paco's Story: A Novel

National Book Award for Fiction 1987

by Larry Heinemann

Paco Sullivan is the only man in Alpha Company to survive a cataclysmic Viet Cong attack on Fire Base Harriette in Vietnam. Everyone else is annihilated. When a medic finally rescues Paco almost two days later,...


1982 selection

So Long, See You Tomorrow

National Book Award for Fiction 1982

by William Maxwell

In this magically evocative novel, William Maxwell explores the enigmatic gravity of the past, which compels us to keep explaining it even as it makes liars out of us every time we try. On a winter morning in...


Rabbit Is Rich

Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 1982, National Book Award for Fiction 1982, National Book Critics Circle for Fiction 1981

by John Updike

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award

 

The hero of John Updike’s Rabbit, Run, ten years after the events of Rabbit Redux, has come to enjoy considerable...


1981 selection

The Stories of John Cheever

National Book Award for Fiction 1981, Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 1979, National Book Critics Circle for Fiction 1978

by John Cheever

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize

When The Stories of John Cheever was originally published, it became an immediate national bestseller and won the Pulitzer Prize.  In the years since, it has...


1979 selection

Going After Cacciato

National Book Award for Fiction 1979

by Tim O'Brien

"To call Going After Cacciato a novel about war is like calling Moby-Dick a novel about whales."

So wrote The New York Times of Tim O'Brien's now classic novel of Vietnam. Winner of the 1979 National Book Award,...


1977 selection

The Spectator Bird

National Book Award for Fiction 1977

by Wallace Stegner

Joe Allston is a retired literary agent who is, in his own words, "just killing time until time gets around to killing me." His parents and his only son are long dead, leaving him with neither ancestors nor...


1975 selection

The Hair of Harold Roux

National Book Award for Fiction 1975

by Thomas Williams

In 1975 the National Book Award Fiction Prize was awarded to two writers: Robert Stone and Thomas Williams. Yet only Stone's Dog Soldiers is still remembered today. That oversight is startling when considering...


Dog Soldiers

National Book Award for Fiction 1975

by Robert Stone

In Saigon during the waning days of the Vietnam War, a small-time journalist named John Converse thinks he'll find action - and profit - by getting involved in a big-time drug deal. But back in the States, things...


1974 selection

Gravity's Rainbow

National Book Award for Fiction 1974

by Thomas Pynchon

Winner of the 1974 National Book Award

“A screaming comes across the sky. . .” A few months after the Germans’ secret V-2 rocket bombs begin falling on London, British Intelligence discovers that a map...


1973 selection

Augustus: A Novel

National Book Award for Fiction 1973

by John Edward Williams

A brilliant and beautifully written novel in the tradition of Robert Graves’ I, Claudius, Augustus is a sweeping narrative that brings vividly to life a compelling cast of historical figures through their...


1972 selection

The Complete Stories

National Book Award for Fiction 1972

by Flannery O'Connor

Winner of the National Book Award

The publication of this extraordinary volume firmly established Flannery O'Connor's monumental contribution to American fiction. There are thirty-one stories here in all, including...


1967 selection

The Fixer

Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 1967, National Book Award for Fiction 1967

by Bernard Malamud & Jonathan Safran Foer

The Fixer is the winner of the 1967 National Book Award for Fiction and the 1967 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

The Fixer (1966) is Bernard Malamud's best-known and most acclaimed novel -- one that makes manifest...


1964 selection

The Centaur: A Novel

National Book Award for Fiction 1964

by John Updike

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD AND THE PRIX DU MEILLEUR LIVRE ÉTRANGER

 

The Centaur is a modern retelling of the legend of Chiron, the noblest and wisest of the centaurs, who, painfully wounded yet unable...


1960 selection

Goodbye Columbus

National Book Award for Fiction 1960

by Philip Roth

National Book Award Winner

Philip Roth's brilliant career was launched when the unknown twenty-five-year-old writer won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship for a collection that was to be called Goodbye,...


1959 selection

The Magic Barrel

National Book Award for Fiction 1959

by Bernard Malamud & Jhumpa Lahiri

Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction

Introduction by Jhumpa Lahiri

Bernard Malamud's first book of short stories, The Magic Barrel, has been recognized as a classic from the time it was published in...


1955 selection

A Fable

Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 1955, National Book Award for Fiction 1955

by William Faulkner

This novel won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 195. An allegorical story of World War I, set in the trenches in France and dealing ostensibly with a mutiny in a French regiment, it was...


1953 selection

Invisible Man

National Book Award for Fiction 1953

by Ralph Ellison

Invisible Man is a milestone in American literature, a book that has continued to engage readers since its appearance in 1952.  A first novel by an unknown writer, it remained on the bestseller list for sixteen...


1950 selection

The Man with the Golden Arm

National Book Award for Fiction 1950

by Nelson Algren & James R. Giles

A novel of rare genius, The Man with the Golden Arm describes the dissolution of a card-dealing WWII veteran named Frankie Machine, caught in the act of slowly cutting his own heart into wafer-thin slices. For...