100 Must Read Prize Winning Novels

A large number of people each year make their reading decisions on the basis of prizes like the Booker and Orange Guide to Fiction. This new title in the successful Must-Read series provides an overview of prize-winning fiction over the decades. With 100 titles fully featured and over 500 read-on recommendations, this unique survey of literature incorporates some of the finest contemporary fiction ever produced including Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (Booker), Jonathan Coe's What a Carve Up (John Llewellyn Rhys), Andrea Levy's Small Island (Orange), Louis de Bernieres's Captain Corelli's Mandolin (Commonwealth Writers' Prize), Zadie Smith's White Teeth (Guardian First Book Award), Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things (Booker). As well as Booker and Pullitzer prize-winners the book also finds room for those that have triumphed in less familiar prizes, such as the Betty Trask and the John Lewellyn Rhys. It looks at prize winners in certain genres such as crime and science fiction, as well as prize winners from other countries: the French Prix de Goncourt and the Australian Miles Franklin award. Because of the sheer range of prizes across countries and genres - this is a diverse and rich list that no book worm would want to be without.

A large number of people each year make their reading decisions on the basis of prizes like the Booker and Orange Guide to Fiction. This new title in the successful Must-Read series provides an overview of prize-winning fiction over the decades. With 100 titles fully featured and over 500 read-on recommendations, this unique survey of literature incorporates some of the finest contemporary fiction ever produced including Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (Booker), Jonathan Coe's What a Carve Up (John Llewellyn Rhys), Andrea Levy's Small Island (Orange), Louis de Bernieres's Captain Corelli's Mandolin (Commonwealth Writers' Prize), Zadie Smith's White Teeth (Guardian First Book Award), Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things (Booker). As well as Booker and Pullitzer prize-winners the book also finds room for those that have triumphed in less familiar prizes, such as the Betty Trask and the John Lewellyn Rhys. It looks at prize winners in certain genres such as crime and science fiction, as well as prize winners from other countries: the French Prix de Goncourt and the Australian Miles Franklin award. Because of the sheer range of prizes across countries and genres - this is a diverse and rich list that no book worm would want to be without.

This is the definitive literary guide to the one hundred best American novels, giving witty, concise, and insightful reviews; historical and literary context; and opinions as to why these novels were chosen as must-reads. It also features an in-depth introduction to the theme of the American novel. Covering the works of major literary figures and some lesser-known writers who you may not have discovered yet, this pocket-size resource is like a friend's recommendation in helping you find your way to great reading, with just enough background information, plot, and details about how readers and critics have felt about these works over the years to pique your curiosity. From literary masterpieces such as James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans to books that changed the direction of American literature such as Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter to writers who defined an era such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Jack Kerouac to contemporary novels such as Toni Morrison's Beloved and Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible, these must-read novels cover American literature from nineteenth-century classics to present-day bestsellers. The guide also includes literary gems from authors such as Dawn Powell and William Maxwell, writers who didn't achieve the same level of success or fame as some of their contemporaries but have made notable literary contributions nonetheless,. The book also features a “Read-On” suggestion list of up to five hundred more recommendations for further reading.

This latest guide in the highly successful Must-Read series depicts 100 of the finest historical fiction tales published, with a further 500 recommendations. The text covers a wide range of classic works and key authors.

The hundred books discussed here have radically altered the course of civilisation , whether they have embodied religions practised by millions, achieved the pinnacle of artistic expression, pointed the way to scientific discovery of enormous consequence, redirected beliefs about the nature of man, or forever altered the global political landscape. For each there is a historical overview, an analysis of the work's effect on our lives today and a lively discussion of the reasons for inclusion.

Winner of the ALA Stonewall Book Award—Barbara Gittings Literature Award Named Best Book of the Year by Bustle Named Most Anticipated Book of the Year by The Millions, Electric Literature, and HuffPost ​The author of the “vivid and urgent…important and timely” (The New York Times Book Review) debut The Map of Salt and Stars returns with this remarkably moving and lyrical novel following three generations of Syrian Americans who are linked by a mysterious species of bird and the truths they carry close to their hearts. Five years after a suspicious fire killed his ornithologist mother, a closeted Syrian American trans boy sheds his birth name and searches for a new one. He has been unable to paint since his mother’s ghost has begun to visit him each evening. As his grandmother’s sole caretaker, he spends his days cooped up in their apartment, avoiding his neighborhood masjid, his estranged sister, and even his best friend (who also happens to be his longtime crush). The only time he feels truly free is when he slips out at night to paint murals on buildings in the once-thriving Manhattan neighborhood known as Little Syria. One night, he enters the abandoned community house and finds the tattered journal of a Syrian American artist named Laila Z, who dedicated her career to painting the birds of North America. She famously and mysteriously disappeared more than sixty years before, but her journal contains proof that both his mother and Laila Z encountered the same rare bird before their deaths. In fact, Laila Z’s past is intimately tied to his mother’s—and his grandmother’s—in ways he never could have expected. Even more surprising, Laila Z’s story reveals the histories of queer and transgender people within his own community that he never knew. Realizing that he isn’t and has never been alone, he has the courage to officially claim a new name: Nadir, an Arabic name meaning rare. As unprecedented numbers of birds are mysteriously drawn to the New York City skies, Nadir enlists the help of his family and friends to unravel what happened to Laila Z and the rare bird his mother died trying to save. Following his mother’s ghost, he uncovers the silences kept in the name of survival by his own community, his own family, and within himself, and discovers the family that was there all along. Featuring Zeyn Joukhadar’s signature “magical and heart-wrenching” (The Christian Science Monitor) storytelling, The Thirty Names of Night is a timely exploration of how we all search for and ultimately embrace who we are.

***2021 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER*** ***THE NATIONAL BESTSELLER*** Winner of the 2021 Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction, Joyce Carol Oates Literary Prize Finalist, 2022 Chautauqua Prize Finalist, Willie Morris Award for Southern Writing Shortlist, and the 2021 Aspen Words Literary Prize shortlist A Read With Jenna Today Show Book Club Pick! An Ebony Magazine Publishing Book Club Pick! One of Washington Post's 50 Notable Works of Fiction | One of Philadelphia Inquirer's Best Books of 2021 | One of Shelf Awareness's Top Ten Fiction Titles of the Year | One of TIME Magazine’s 100 Must-Read Books | One of NPR.org's "Books We Love" | EW’s "Guide to the Biggest and Buzziest Books of 2021" | One of the New York Public Library's Best Books for Adults | San Diego Union Tribune—My Favorite Things from 2021 | Writer's Bone's Best Books of 2021 | Atlanta Journal Constitution—Top 10 Southern Books of the Year | One of the Guardian's (UK) Best Ten 21st Century Comic Novels | One of Entertainment Weekly's 15 Books You Need to Read This June | On Entertainment Weekly's "Must List" | One of the New York Post's Best Summer Reading books | One of GMA's 27 Books for June | One of USA Today's 5 Books Not to Miss | One of Fortune's 21 Most Anticipated Books Coming Out in the Second Half of 2021 | One of The Root's PageTurners: It’s Getting Hot in Here | One of Real Simple's Best New Books to Read in 2021 An astounding work of fiction from New York Times bestselling author Jason Mott, always deeply honest, at times electrically funny, that goes to the heart of racism, police violence, and the hidden costs exacted upon Black Americans and America as a whole In Jason Mott’s Hell of a Book, a Black author sets out on a cross-country publicity tour to promote his bestselling novel. That storyline drives Hell of a Book and is the scaffolding of something much larger and more urgent: Mott’s novel also tells the story of Soot, a young Black boy living in a rural town in the recent past, and The Kid, a possibly imaginary child who appears to the author on his tour. As these characters’ stories build and converge, they astonish. For while this heartbreaking and magical book entertains and is at once about family, love of parents and children, art and money, it’s also about the nation’s reckoning with a tragic police shooting playing over and over again on the news. And with what it can mean to be Black in America. Who has been killed? Who is The Kid? Will the author finish his book tour, and what kind of world will he leave behind? Unforgettably told, with characters who burn into your mind and an electrifying plot ideal for book club discussion, Hell of a Book is the novel Mott has been writing in his head for the last ten years. And in its final twists, it truly becomes its title.

**One of Time’s 32 Books You Need to Read This Summer** An NPR Best Book of 2019 An “electrifying” (Publishers Weekly) debut novel from Rhodes Scholar and winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing about a Nigerian family living in Utah and their uneasy assimilation to American life. Living in small-town Utah has always been an uncomfortable fit for Tunde Akinola’s family, especially for his Nigeria-born parents. Though Tunde speaks English with a Midwestern accent, he can’t escape the children who rub his skin and ask why the black won’t come off. As he struggles to fit in, he finds little solace from his parents who are grappling with their own issues. Tunde’s father, ever the optimist, works tirelessly chasing his American dream while his wife, lonely in Utah without family and friends, sinks deeper into schizophrenia. Then one otherwise-ordinary morning, Tunde’s mother wakes him with a hug, bundles him and his baby brother into the car, and takes them away from the only home they’ve ever known. But running away doesn’t bring her, or her children, any relief; once Tunde’s father tracks them down, she flees to Nigeria, and Tunde never feels at home again. He spends the rest of his childhood and young adulthood searching for connection—to the wary stepmother and stepbrothers he gains when his father remarries; to the Utah residents who mock his father’s accent; to evangelical religion; to his Texas middle school’s crowd of African-Americans; to the fraternity brothers of his historically black college. In so doing, he discovers something that sends him on a journey away from everything he has known. Sweeping, stirring, and perspective-shifting, A Particular Kind of Black Man is “wild, vulnerable, lived…A study of the particulate self, the self as a constellation of moving parts” (The New York Times Book Review).