Fiction National Book Award Finalists Announced

On Wednesday, October 13, Pat Conroy announced the fiction finalists for the 2010 National Book Award. Stay tuned for the winner to be announced on November 16.

Peter Carey, Parrot and Olivier in America--Olivier is the traumatized child of aristocratic survivors of the French Revolution. Parrot is the motherless son of an itinerant English printer. They are born on different sides of history, but their lives will be connected in the United States by an enigmatic one-armed marquis.

Jaimy Gordon, Lord of Misrule--Lord of Misrule is a darkly realistic novel about a young woman living through a year of horse racing at a half-mile track in West Virginia, while everyone's best laid schemes keep going brutally wrong.

Nicole Krauss, Great House--The lives of four strangers are thrown into chaos over an enormous, stolen desk, including an antique dealer in Jerusalem, a man in London, and an American novelist who inherited it from a poet and victim of Pinochet's secret police.

Lionel Shriver, So Much for That--From the author of The Post-Birthday World and A Perfectly Good Family comes this deeply resonant novel that looks at a failing marriage and America's healthcare system, and poses the disturbing moral question that affects more people every day: How much is one life worth?

Karen Tei Yamashita, I Hotel--Dazzling and ambitious, this hip, multi-voiced fusion of prose, playwriting, graphic art, and philosophy spins an epic tale of America's struggle for civil rights as it played out in San Francisco's Chinatown. Divided into ten novellas, one for each year, I Hotel begins in 1968, when Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated, students took to the streets, the Vietnam War raged, and cities burned. (Publisher's Description) SH