Books with category 🏆 National Book Award
Displaying 3 books

James

James, by Percival Everett, is a brilliant and action-packed reimagining of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, told from the perspective of the enslaved character Jim. This novel is both harrowing and ferociously funny, showcasing Jim's agency, intelligence, and compassion in a radically new light.

When Jim overhears that he is about to be sold and separated from his wife and daughter, he decides to hide on Jackson Island to plan his next move. Meanwhile, Huck Finn, seeking to escape his violent father, fakes his own death. Together, they embark on a dangerous and transcendent journey down the Mississippi River, facing floods, storms, and scam artists, all while navigating the promise and peril of the Free States and beyond.

With electrifying humor and lacerating observations, James is a redefining a cornerstone of twenty-first century American literature.

The Great Believers

2018

by Rebecca Makkai

A dazzling new novel of friendship and redemption in the face of tragedy and loss set in 1980s Chicago and contemporary Paris.

In 1985, Yale Tishman, the development director for an art gallery in Chicago, is about to pull off an amazing coup, bringing in an extraordinary collection of 1920s paintings as a gift to the gallery. Yet as his career begins to flourish, the carnage of the AIDS epidemic grows around him. One by one, his friends are dying and after his friend Nico's funeral, the virus circles closer and closer to Yale himself. Soon the only person he has left is Fiona, Nico's little sister.

Thirty years later, Fiona is in Paris tracking down her estranged daughter who disappeared into a cult. While staying with an old friend, a famous photographer who documented the Chicago crisis, she finds herself finally grappling with the devastating ways AIDS affected her life and her relationship with her daughter. The two intertwining stories take us through the heartbreak of the eighties and the chaos of the modern world, as both Yale and Fiona struggle to find goodness in the midst of disaster.

The Year of Magical Thinking

2005

by Joan Didion

An autobiographical portrait of marriage and motherhood by the acclaimed author details her struggle to come to terms with life and death, illness, sanity, personal upheaval, and grief.

"In this dramatic adaptation of her award-winning, bestselling memoir (which Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times called "an indelible portrait of loss and grief . . . a haunting portrait of a four-decade-long marriage), Joan Didion transforms the story of the sudden and unexpected loss of her husband and their only daughter into a stunning and powerful one-woman play. The first theatrical production of The Year of Magical Thinking opened at the Booth Theatre on March 29, 2007, starring Vanessa Redgrave and directed by David Hare.

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