Read an Award-Winning Book!

The 2013 National Book Awards were announced on November 20! Check out fiction winner James McBride's The Good Lord Bird. McBride tells the story of a young slave traveling with abolitionist John Brown. Henry, the slave, is mistaken for a girl, taken from his master by Brown, and gives a first-hand account of the raid on Harper's Ferry.

Cynthia Kadohata won the Young People's Literature prize for The Thing About Luck. Just when twelve-year-old Summer thinks nothing else can possibly go wrong in a year of bad luck, an emergency takes her parents to Japan, leaving Summer to care for her little brother while helping her grandmother cook and do laundry for harvest workers.



The Unwinding: an Inner History of the New America by George Packer won the nonfiction award. Through an examination of the lives of several Americans and leading public figures over the past three decades, Packer portrays a superpower in danger of coming apart at the seams, its elites no longer elite, its institutions no longer working, its ordinary people left to improvise their own schemes for success and salvation.


Younger readers can find the newest Young Hoosier Book Award nominees in Children's Services.  There are books on a variety of topics for any age.

Want to find more award winners to read? You can find lists on our Readers Advisory page!