Book Award Winners, Finalists Announced

Book awards season is in full swing.

The Man Booker Prize for fiction has been awarded to Hilary Mantel for Bring Up the Bodies, the sequel to Wolf Hall, which won the prestigious award in 2009. This second book in the Tudor trilogy traces the bloody downfall of Anne Boleyn. Mantel is only the third author to win the award twice, and the first ever to win the award for a sequel.

In other book award news, the finalists for the National Book Awards have been announced.

Among the fiction finalists are the recently named MacArthur "Genius" Fellow Junot Diaz for his short story collection, This Is How You Lose Her. Two other finalists deal with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and their aftermaths: The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers, and Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain.

Completing the list of fiction finalists are The Round House by Louise Erdrich and Dave Eggers' A Hologram for the King.

Nonfiction finalists include Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Katherine Boo's account of life in a Mumbai slum, and journalist Anthony Shadid's House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family and a Lost Middle East. Sadly, Shadid died in February at 43 while covering the civil war in Syria for The New York Times.

Rounding out the nonfiction nominees is Robert Caro's fourth book on Lyndon Johnson, The Passage of Power; Anne Applebaum's Iron Curtain, The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956; and The Boy Kings of Texas, a memoir of a sensitive soul growing up in the macho barrio of Brownsville, Texas, by Domingo Martinez.

National Book Award winners will be announced on November 14. Check out the complete list of finalists and come to the Troy Library's Adult Information area or check our catalog to reserve one of these great reads.