Book awards: ALA Notable Books for Adults

Book awards by cover

(show all 335 covers)

Works (336)

Titles	Order
Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson	1981
The Beet Queen by Louise Erdrich	1986
Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood	1990
The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother by James McBride	1997) (Book of the Year
!Yo! by Julia Alvarez	1998
The Aguero Sisters by Cristina Garcia	1998
Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood	1998
All Over but the Shoutin' by Rick Bragg	1998
American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence by Pauline Maier	1998
Bad Land: An American Romance by Jonathan Raban	1998
Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War by Barbara Ehrenreich	1998
Blu's Hanging by Lois-Ann Yamanaka	1998
The Bounty by Derek Walcott	1998
Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier	1998
The Far Euphrates by Aryeh Lev Stollman	1998
Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster by Jon Krakauer	1998
The Jade Peony by Wayson Choy	1998
News of the Spirit by Lee Smith	1998
Next of Kin: My Conversations with Chimpanzees by Roger Fouts	1998
Ornament and Silence : Essays on Women's Lives, from Virginia Woolf to Germaine Greer by Kennedy Fraser	1998
A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution: 1891-1924 by Orlando Figes	1998
The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men against the Sea by Sebastian Junger	1998
Primate Behavior by Sarah Lindsay	1998
Reading in the Dark: A Novel by Seamus Deane	1998
The River at the Center of the World by Simon Winchester	1998
T. Rex and the Crater of Doom by Walter Alvarez	1998
Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell by Deborah Solomon	1998
What Are Big Girls Made Of?: Poems by Marge Piercy	1998
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami	1998
The Wishbones by Tom Perrotta	1998
About a Boy by Nick Hornby	1999
After All: Last Poems by William Matthews	1999
Articles of Faith: A Frontline History of the Abortion Wars by Cynthia Gorney	1999
Beach Boy by Ardashir Vakil	1999
A Beautiful Mind: The Life of Mathematical Genius and Nobel Laureate John Nash by Sylvia Nasar	1999
Birds of America by Lorrie Moore	1999
Charming Billy by Alice McDermott	1999
The Coast of Good Intentions by Michael Byers	1999
Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges	1999
The Farming of Bones by Edwidge Danticat	1999
Flanders by Patricia Anthony	1999
A Hope in the Unseen: An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League by Ron Suskind	1999
I Married a Communist by Philip Roth	1999
King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa by Adam Hochschild	1999
The Life of Thomas More by Peter Ackroyd	1999
Lindbergh by A. Scott Berg	1999
Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963-65 by Taylor Branch	1999
The Road to Ubar: Finding the Atlantis of the Sands by Nicholas Clapp	1999
Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea by Gary Kinder	1999
Sweet Machine: Poems by Mark Doty	1999
Tales from Ovid by Ted Hughes	1999
Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. by Ron Chernow	1999
Triage by Scott Anderson	1999
The Voyage of the Narwhal by Andrea Barrett	1999
Without: Poems by Donald Hall	1999
Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War by Mark Bowden	2000
A Clearing in the Distance by Witold Rybczynski	2000
The Colony of Unrequited Dreams: A Novel by Wayne Johnston	2000
The Country Life: A Novel by Rachel Cusk	2000
A Dangerous Friend by Ward Just	2000
Diasporadic: Poems by Patty Seyburn	2000
The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene	2000
Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II by John W. Dower	2000
For the Relief of Unbearable Urges by Nathan Englander	2000
A Gesture Life: A Novel by Chang-Rae Lee	2000
Henry of Atlantic City: A Novel by Frederick Reuss	2000
The Hours by Michael Cunningham	2000
House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III	2000
How to Read a Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry by Edward Hirsch	2000
I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1933–1941 by Victor Klemperer	2000
Journey Beyond Selene: Remarkable Expeditions Past Our Moon and to the Ends of the Solar System by Jeffrey Kluger	2000
King of the World by David Remnick	2000
Master Georgie by Beryl Bainbridge	2000
Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem	2000
Opened Ground: Poems, 1966—1996 by Seamus Heaney	2000
The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession by Susan Orlean	2000
Passage to Juneau by Jonathan Raban	2000
Show Me a Hero: A Tale of Murder, Suicide, Race, and Redemption by Lisa Belkin	2000
A Star Called Henry by Roddy Doyle	2000
Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov) by Stacy Schiff	2000
Waiting by Ha Jin	2000
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon	2001
Anil’s Ghost by Michael Ondaatje	2001
Barrow's Boys by Fergus Fleming	2001
Being Dead by Jim Crace	2001
Beowulf by Seamus Heaney	2001
The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood	2001
Bruce Chatwin by Nicholas Shakespeare	2001
The Collaborator by Alice Kaplan	2001
The Collected Poems by Stanley Kunitz	2001
The Delinquent Virgin by Laura Kalpakian	2001
Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee	2001
Don't Tell Anyone: Fiction by Frederick Busch	2001
English Passengers by Matthew Kneale	2001
From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life by Jacques Barzun	2001
Genome by Matt Ridley	2001
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers	2001
In Siberia by Colin Thubron	2001
The Last Samurai by Helen Dewitt	2001
Learning Human: Selected Poems by Les Murray	2001
Living to Tell: A Novel by Antonya Nelson	2001
Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran by Elaine Sciolino	2001
The Quick and the Dead by Joy Williams	2001
Scar Vegas: And Other Stories by Tom Paine	2001
Truth & Bright Water by Thomas King	2001
White Teeth by Zadie Smith	2001
American Chica: Two Worlds, One Childhood by Marie Arana	2002
Among the Missing by Dan Chaon	2002
Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald	2002
The Aztec Treasure House: New and Selected Essays by Evan S. Connell	2002
The Breast Cancer Wars: Hope, Fear, and the Pursuit of a Cure in Twentieth-Century America by Barron H. Lerner	2002
Bucking the Tiger by Bruce Olds	2002
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen	2002
Crooked River Burning by Mark Winegardner	2002
Crossing Over by Rubén Martínez	2002
The Death of Vishnu by Manil Suri	2002
Erasure by Percival Everett	2002
Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal by Eric Schlosser	2002
Going Up the River: Travels in a Prison Nation by Joseph Hallinan	2002
Grant by Jean Edward Smith	2002
Island: The Complete Stories by Alistair MacLeod	2002
John Adams by David McCullough	2002
The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression by Andrew Solomon	2002
The Pickup by Nadine Gordimer	2002
River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze (P.S.) by Peter Hessler	2002
Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems by Billy Collins	2002
Samuel Johnson Is Indignant: Stories by Lydia Davis	2002
Seabiscuit: An American Legend by Laura Hillenbrand	2002
True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey	2002
An Unexpected Light: Travels in Afghanistan by Jason Elliot	2002
War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton, and the Generals by David Halberstam	2002
What the Ice Gets : Shackleton's Antarctic Expedition 1914-1916 by Melinda Mueller	2002
Atonement by Ian McEwan	2003
Bellocq's Ophelia: Poems by Natasha Trethewey	2003
Blood Diamonds by Greg Campbell	2003
The Book of Illusions by Paul Auster	2003
Can't Be Satisfied: The Life and Times of Muddy Waters by Robert Gordon	2003
Caramelo by Sandra Cisneros	2003
The Complete Works of Isaac Babel by Isaac Babel	2003
Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science by Atul Gawande	2003
Family Matters by Rohinton Mistry	2003
The Future of Life by Edward O. Wilson	2003
The Future of the Past by Alexander Stille	2003
God's Fool by Mark Slouka	2003
In Revere, in Those Days by Roland Merullo	2003
Jesse James, Last Rebel of the Civil War by T. J. Stiles	2003
Lovely Green Eyes by Arnošt Lustig	2003
Lusitania by Diana Preston	2003
Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert A. Caro	2003
Miniatures by Norah Labiner	2003
The Painted Bed: Poems by Donald Hall	2003
Poems Seven: New and Complete Poetry by Alan Dugan	2003
Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! by Kenzaburō Ōe	2003
The Russian Debutante's Handbook by Gary Shteyngart	2003
Selected Essays of John Berger by John Berger	2003
The Shell Collector: Stories by Anthony Doerr	2003
That They May Face the Rising Sun by John McGahern	2003
Theodore Rex by Edmund Morris	2003
Alabanza: New and Selected Poems 1982-2002 by Martin Espada	2004
Alva & Irva: The Twins Who Saved a City by Edward Carey	2004
Any Human Heart by William Boyd	2004
Beyond the River: The Untold Story of the Heroes of the Underground Railroad by Ann Hagedorn	2004
Brick Lane by Monica Ali	2004
Brownsville: Stories by Oscar Casares	2004
The Cave by José Saramago	2004
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon	2004
Drinking Coffee Elsewhere by ZZ Packer	2004
Flat Broke with Children: Women in the Age of Welfare Reform by Sharon Hays	2004
Food, Inc.: Mendel to Monsanto--The Promises and Perils of the Biotech Harvest by Peter Pringle	2004
The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem	2004
The Inquisitors' Manual by António Lobo Antunes	2004
Khrushchev: The Man and His Era by William Taubman	2004
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini	2004
The Known World by Edward P. Jones	2004
Love by Toni Morrison	2004
Michelangelo & The Pope's Ceiling by Ross King	2004
Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind by David Quammen	2004
Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder	2004
Naked in the Promised Land: A Memoir by Lillian Faderman	2004
Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc	2004
Star of the Sea by Joseph O'Connor	2004
Triangle: The Fire that Changed America by David Von Drehle	2004
Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith by Jon Krakauer	2004
Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston by Valerie Boyd	2004
1968: The Year That Rocked the World by Mark Kurlansky	2005
The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States by National Commission on Terrorist Attacks	2005
Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow	2005
Birds Without Wings by Louis de Bernières	2005
Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib by Seymour M. Hersh	2005
Civil Wars: A Battle for Gay Marriage by David Moats	2005
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell	2005
The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni: 1968-1998 (P.S.) by Nikki Giovanni	2005
Delights & Shadows by Ted Kooser	2005
Goya by Robert Hughes	2005
The Half Brother by Lars Saabye Christensen	2005
I Sailed with Magellan by Stuart Dybek	2005
The Lemon Table by Julian Barnes	2005
The Madonna of Excelsior: A Novel by Zakes Mda	2005
Old School by Tobias Wolff	2005
One Man's Castle: Clarence Darrow in Defense of the American Dream by Phyllis Vine	2005
One With Nineveh: Politics, Consumption, and the Human Future by Paul R. Ehrlich	2005
Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books by Aaron Lansky	2005
Pandora's Baby: How the First Test Tube Babies Sparked the Reproductive Revolution by Robin Marantz Henig	2005
The Plot Against America by Philip Roth	2005
Popular Music from Vittula by Mikael Niemi	2005
Sea of Glory: America's Voyage of Discovery, the U.S. Exploring Expedition, 1838-1842 by Nathaniel Philbrick	2005
The Swallows of Kabul by Yasmina Khadra	2005
The Ticket Out: Darryl Strawberry and the Boys of Crenshaw by Michael Sokolove	2005
Washington's Crossing by David Hackett Fischer	2005
American Sublime by Elizabeth Alexander	2006
The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq by George Packer	2006
Beasts of No Nation: A Novel (P.S.) by Uzodinma Iweala	2006
Bound for Canaan: The Under-ground Railroad and the War for the Soul of America by Fergus M. Bordewich	2006
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond	2006
Conspiracy of Fools: A True Story by Kurt Eichenwald	2006
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer	2006
The Fly in the Cathedral: How a Group of Cambridge Scientists Won the International Race to Split the Atom by Brian Cathcart	2006
The Glass Castle: A Memoir by Jeannette Walls	2006
Human Cargo: A Journey Among Refugees by Caroline Moorehead	2006
The Hummingbird's Daughter by Luis Alberto Urrea	2006
The Hungry Tide: A Novel by Amitav Ghosh	2006
John Brown, Abolitionist: The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights by David S. Reynolds	2006
Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami	2006
Midnight at the Dragon Café by Judy Fong Bates	2006
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro	2006
New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan by Jill Lepore	2006
No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy	2006
The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life by Tom Reiss	2006
Saturday by Ian McEwan	2006
Shockwave: Countdown to Hiroshima (P.S.) by Stephen Walker	2006
Streets in Their Own Ink: Poems by Stuart Dybek	2006
Veronica by Mary Gaitskill	2006
Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster by Svetlana Alexievich	2006
A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City: A Diary by Anonymous	2006
The Attack by Yasmina Khadra	2007
Beautiful Dreamer: A Novel by Christopher Bigsby	2007
Black Swan Green by David Mitchell	2007
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman by Haruki Murakami	2007
Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City by Jed Horne	2007
Burning Wyclif by Thom Satterlee	2007
Famous by Kathleen Flenniken	2007
Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change by Elizabeth Kolbert	2007
Firmin by Sam Savage	2007
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel	2007
The Girls by Lori Lansens	2007
The Heartless Stone: A Journey through the World of Diamonds, Deceit, and Desire by Tom Zoellner	2007
The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai	2007
James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon by Julie Phillips	2007
The Judgement of Paris by Ross King	2007
The Madonnas of Leningrad by Debra Dean	2007
Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War by Nathaniel Philbrick	2007
Oracle Bones: A Journey Through Time in China (P.S.) by Peter Hessler	2007
The People's Act of Love by James Meek	2007
The Road by Cormac McCarthy	2007
The Secret River by Kate Grenville	2007
There Is No Me Without You: One Woman's Odyssey to Rescue Her Country's Children by Melissa Fay Greene	2007
The Weather Makers : How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth by Tim Flannery	2007
The whistling season by Ivan Doig	2007
William Henry Harrison And Other Poems by David R. Slavitt	2007
The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan	2007
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver	2008
An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England by Brock Clarke	2008
Away by Amy Bloom	2008
The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science by Natalie Angier	2008
Cheating at Canasta: Stories by William Trevor	2008
The Complete Stories by David Malouf	2008
Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson	2008
Finn by Jon Clinch	2008
Five Skies by Ron Carlson	2008
The Five-Forty-Five to Cannes by Tess Uriza Holthe	2008
Gertrude Bell: Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations by Georgina Howell	2008
How Doctors Think by Jerome Groopman	2008
In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus: New and Selected Poems, 1955–2007 by X. J. Kennedy	2008
The Ministry of Special Cases by Nathan Englander	2008
Mister Pip by Lloyd Jones	2008
A New Hunger by Laure-Anne Bosselaar	2008
Oil on the Brain: Adventures from the Pump to the Pipeline by Lisa Margonelli	2008
On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan	2008
Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson	2008
The Pesthouse by Jim Crace	2008
Super Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart by Ian Ayres	2008
When a Crocodile Eats the Sun by Peter Godwin	2008
The World Without Us by Alan Weisman	2008
The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon	2008
The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story by Diane Ackerman	2008
American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPA: When FDR Put the Nation to Work by Nick Taylor	2009
Atmospheric Disturbances: A Novel by Rivka Galchen	2009
The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century by Steve Coll	2009
City of Thieves by David Benioff	2009
Dangerous Laughter: Thirteen Stories by Steven Millhauser	2009
The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals by Jane Mayer	2009
Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950 by Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore	2009
The Forever War by Dexter Filkins	2009
The Ghost Soldiers: Poems by James Tate	2009
The Ginseng Hunter: A Novel by Jeff Talarigo	2009
The Hakawati by Rabih Alameddine	2009
The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family by Annette Gordon-Reed	2009
In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto by Michael Pollan	2009
Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout	2009
Peace by Richard Bausch	2009
Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood by Mark Harris	2009
The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich	2009
Resistance by Owen Sheers	2009
Special Orders: Poems by Edward Hirsch	2009
The Suicide Index: Putting My Father's Death in Order by Joan Wickersham	2009
This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust	2009
Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do by Tom Vanderbilt	2009
Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri	2009
A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World by Tony Horwitz	2009
The Wasted Vigil by Nadeem Aslam	2009
The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes	2010
The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker	2010
Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon	2010
Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen by Christopher McDougall	2010
Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín	2010
Columbine by Dave Cullen	2010
The Convalescent by Jessica Anthony	2010
Face by Sherman Alexie	2010
Generosity: An Enhancement by Richard Powers	2010
The Good Soldiers by David Finkel	2010
The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War by Nicholas Thompson	2010
Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann	2010
Little Bee by Chris Cleave	2010
The Lost City of Z by David Grann	2010
A Mercy: A Novel by Toni Morrison	2010
The Photographer: Into War-torn Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders by Emmanuel Guibert	2010
Provenance: how a con man and a forger rewrote the history of modern art by Laney Salisbury	2010
The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream by Patrick Radden Keefe	2010
Spooner by Pete Dexter	2010
Stitches: A Memoir by David Small	2010
Tears in the Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and Its Aftermath by Michael Norman	2010
Tinkers by Paul Harding	2010
The vagrants by Yiyun Li	2010
What Goes On: Selected and New Poems 1995-2009 by Stephen Dunn	2010
The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood	2010
Zeitoun by Dave Eggers	2010

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Book awards authors (307)

Award description

"Since 1944, the goal of the Notable Books Council has been to make available to the nation’s readers a list of 25 very good, very readable, and at times very important fiction, nonfiction, and poetry books for the adult reader."

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