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Book Award Winners
March 2026 |
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 “Reading lets us live in someone else’s shoes. Literature builds bridges; it makes our world larger, not smaller."
― R.F. Kuang, Yellowface 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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A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar In a near-future Kolkata, Ma, her two-year-old daughter, and her elderly father are just days from leaving the collapsing city behind to join Ma's husband in Ann Arbor, Michigan. After procuring long-awaited visas from the consulate, they pack their bags for the flight to America. But in the morning they awaken to discover that Ma's purse, containing their treasured immigration documents, has been stolen. Set over the course of one week, A Guardian and a Thief tells two stories: the story of Ma's frantic search for the thief while keeping hunger at bay during a worsening food shortage; and the story of Boomba, the thief, whose desperation to care for his family drives him to commit a series of escalating crimes whose consequences he cannot fathom.
2026 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellent in Fiction
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Awake in the Floating City
by Susanna Kwan
Bo knows she should go. Years of rain have drowned the city and almost everyone else has fled. Her mother was carried away in a storm surge and ever since, Bo has been alone. She is stalled: an artist unable to make art, a daughter unable to give up the hope that her mother may still be alive. Half-heartedly, she allows her cousin to plan for her escape--but as the departure day approaches, she finds a note slipped under her door from Mia, an elderly woman who lives in her building and wants to hire Bo to be her caregiver. Suddenly, Bo has a reason to stay. Mia can be prickly, and yet still she and Bo forge a connection deeper than any Bo has had with a client. Mia shares stories of her life that pull Bo back toward art, toward the practice she thought she'd abandoned. Listening to Mia, allowing her memories to become entangled with Bo's own, she's struck by how much history will be lost as the city gives way to water.
2026 Asian American Adult Fiction Winner
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Fagin the Thief
by Allison Epstein
Long before Oliver Twist stumbled onto the scene, Jacob Fagin was scratching out a life for himself in the dark alleys of nineteenth-century London. Born in the Jewish enclave of Stepney shortly after his father was executed as a thief, Jacob and his open-minded mother Leah are each other's whole world. But Jacob's prospects are forever altered when a light-fingered pickpocket takes Jacob under his wing and teaches him a trade that pays far better than the neighborhood boys could possibly dream. Striking out on his own, Jacob familiarizes himself with London's highest value neighborhoods while forging his own path in the shadows.
2026 Sophie Brody Medal
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King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculationby Scott AndersonOn New Year's Eve, 1977, on a state visit to Iran, President Jimmy Carter toasted Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, King of Kings, Light of the Aryans, Shadow of God on Earth, praising Iran as an island of stability. Iran had the world's fifth largest army and was awash in billions of dollars in oil revenues. The Shah seemed invulnerable, and invaluable to the United States as an ally in the Cold War. Fourteen months later the Shah fled into exile, forced from the throne by a volcanic religious revolution led by a fiery cleric named Ayatollah Khomeini. The ensuing hostage crisis forever damaged America's standing in the world. The spellbinding story Scott Anderson weaves is one of a dictator blind to the disdain of his subjects and a superpower blundering into disaster.
2025 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction
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His Truth Is Marching on: John Lewis and the Power of Hope by Jon MeachamCivil rights activist and Congressman John Lewis, who at age twenty-five marched in Selma and was beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, was a visionary and a man of faith. Using intimate interviews with Lewis and his family and deep research into the history of the civil rights movement, Meacham writes of how the activist and leader was inspired by the Bible, his mother's unbreakable spirit, his sharecropper father's tireless ambition, and his teachers in nonviolence, Reverend James Lawson and Martin Luther King, Jr.
A believer in hope above all else, Lewis learned from a young age that nonviolence was not only a tactic but a philosophy, a biblical imperative, and a transforming reality.
2021 Audie Award for History/Biography Audiobook
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Ancillary Justice
by Ann Leckie
On a remote, icy planet, the soldier known as Breq is drawing closer to completing her quest. Once, she was the Justice of Toren--a colossal starship with an artificial intelligence linking thousands of soldiers in the service of the Radch, the empire that conquered the galaxy. Now, an act of treachery has ripped it all away, leaving her with one fragile human body, unanswered questions, and a burning desire for vengeance.
2013 Nebula Award for Best Novel
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Still Life: A Chief Inspector Gamache Novel
by Louise Penny
Chief Inspector Armand Gamache of the Surêté du Québec and his team of investigators are called in to the scene of a suspicious death in a rural village south of Montreal. Jane Neal, a local fixture in the tiny hamlet of Three Pines, just north of the U.S. border, has been found dead in the woods. The locals are certain it's a tragic hunting accident and nothing more, but Gamache smells something foul in these remote woods, and is soon certain that Jane Neal died at the hands of someone much more sinister than a careless bowhunter. Still Life introduces not only an engaging series hero in Inspector Gamache, who commands his forces---and this series---with integrity and quiet courage, but also a winning and talented writer of traditional mysteries in the person of Louise Penny.
2007 Barry Award for Best First Novel
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Adulthood Is a Myth: A Sarah's Scribbles Collection Volume 1
by Sarah Andersen
'Adulthood is a myth' confronts head-on the horrors, anxiety, and awkwardness of modern adult life. From the agony of holding hands with a gorgeous guy to the yawning pit of hell that is the wifi gone down to the eye-watering pain of eating too-hot pizza because one cannot stand to wait for it to cool down, Sarah fearlessly documents it all. Like the work of fellow Millennial authors Allie Brosh, Grace Helbig, and Gemma Correll, Sarah's total frankness on extremely personal issues such as body image, self-consciousness, introversion, relationships, and bra-washing makes her comics highly relatable and consistently hilarious.
2016 Goodreads Choice Award for Graphic Novels and Comics
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Forsyth County Public Library
660 W. Fifth St., Winston-Salem, NC 27101
336-703-2665forsythlibrary.org |
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