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Book Award Winners
December 2025 |
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 “Sometimes our fate resembles a fruit tree in winter. Who would think that those branches would turn green again and blossom, but we hope it, we know it.” ― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Welcome to our newest issue of the Book Award Winners newsletter. This quarterly newsletter provides reading suggestions of celebrated titles both new and old. All titles are available in print through the Forsyth County library system, and some are available for immediate download in e-book or audiobook format on your phone or tablet. Download the Libby and Hoopla apps or ask a librarian about our NC Digital Library for more information. |
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The Melancholy of Untold History
by Minsoo Kang
Famous for his dispelling of the national myth, the Historian understands the power of narrative. He has inspired another young professor to search for her own truths, while trying to understand the way fiction creates fact and how sometimes the past can only be understood by filling in holes with a new narrative. Which is exactly what he needs when his wife passes away and his world no longer makes sense. Together the protégé and the Historian find comfort in each other. Yet they know their time together is fleeting, as time usually is. Only the gods have an abundance of time, and yet--the two discover--even that might not be so clear cut.
2025 Mythopoeic Society Winner for Adult Literature
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Ghosts of Waikiki
by Jennifer K. Morita
After the newspaper she works for folds and the freelance assignments no longer pay the bills, Maya Wong reluctantly returns to her native Hawaii to ghostwrite controversial land developer Parker Hamilton's biography. But when the Hamilton patriarch is found dead under suspicious circumstances, Maya is unwittingly drawn into the investigation. All too soon, Maya is dodging assailants and digging for clues while juggling girls' nights out with her old BFFs and weekly family dinners. Convinced the police are after the wrong man, Maya is determined to stop the killer before it's too late.
2025 Macavity Award for Best First Mystery
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Charlie Hustle: The Rise and Fall of Pete Rose, and the Last Glory Days of Baseball by Keith O'BrienCharlie Hustle tells the full story of one of America's most epic tragedies--the rise and fall of Pete Rose. Drawing on firsthand interviews with Rose himself and with his associates, as well as on investigators' reports, FBI and court records, archives, and a mountain of press coverage, Keith O'Brien chronicles how Rose fell so far. It is Pete Rose as we've never seen him before.
2025 Pen America Award for Biography
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Someone You Can Build a Nest in
by John Wiswell
Shesheshen is a shapeshifter, who happily resides as an amorphous lump at the bottom of a ruined manor. When her rest is interrupted by hunters intent on murdering her, she constructs a body from the remains of past meals: a metal chain for a backbone, borrowed bones for limbs, and a bear trap as an extra mouth. However, the hunters chase Shesheshen out of her home and off a cliff. Badly hurt, she's found and nursed back to health by Homily, a warm-hearted human, who has mistaken Shesheshen as a fellow human.
2025 Locus Award Winner for First Novel
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Just After Sunset
by Stephen King
Just After Sunset -- call it dusk, call it twilight, it's a time when human intercourse takes on an unnatural cast, when nothing is quite as it appears, when the imagination begins to reach for shadows as they dissipate to darkness and living daylight can be scared right out of you. It's the perfect time for Stephen King.
2008 Bram Stoker Award for a Fiction Collection
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The Food of Oaxaca: Recipes and Stories from Mexico's Culinary Capital
by Alejandro Ruiz
In The Food of Oaxaca, chef Alejandro Ruiz introduces home cooks to the vibrant foods of his home state with more than 50 recipes both ancestral and original. Divided into three parts, the book covers the traditional dishes of the region, where Ruiz grew up; the cuisine of the Oaxacan coast, where he spent many years; and the food he serves today at his acclaimed restaurant, Casa Oaxaca.
2022 IACP Cookbook Award for Culinary Travel
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The Hours
by Michael Cunningham
Michael Cunningham draws inventively on the life and work of Virginia Woolf to tell the story of a group of contemporary characters struggling with the conflicting claims of love and inheritance, hope and despair. The narrative of Woolf's last days before her suicide early in World War II counterpoints the fictional stories of Samuel, a famous poet whose life has been shadowed by his talented and troubled mother, and his lifelong friend Clarissa, who strives to forge a balanced and rewarding life in spite of the demands of friends, lovers, and family.
1999 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
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A Marvellous Light
by Freya Marske
Robin Blyth has more than enough bother in his life. He's struggling to be a good older brother, a responsible employer, and the harried baronet of a seat gutted by his late parents' excesses. When an administrative mistake sees him named the civil service liaison to a hidden magical society, he discovers what's been operating beneath the unextraordinary reality he's always known. Now Robin must contend with the beauty and danger of magic, an excruciating deadly curse, and the alarming visions of the future that come with it--not to mention Edwin Courcey, his cold and prickly counterpart in the magical bureaucracy, who clearly wishes Robin were anyone and anywhere else. Thrown together and facing unexpected dangers, Robin and Edwin discover a plot that threatens every magician in the British Isles--and a secret that more than one person has already died to keep.
2022 Romantic Novel of the Year Award - Fantasy Romantic
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Forsyth County Public Library
660 W. Fifth St., Winston-Salem, NC 27101
336-703-2665forsythlibrary.org |
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