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Book Award Winners
June 2026 |
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 "Books are a uniquely portable magic. I usually listen to one in the car...and carry another wherever I go. You just never know when you'll want an escape hatch."
― Stephen King, On Writing 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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There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America by Brian GoldstoneThe working homeless. In a country where hard work and determination are supposed to lead to success, there is something scandalous about this phrase. But skyrocketing rents, low wages, and a lack of tenant rights have produced a startling phenomenon: People with full-time jobs cannot keep a roof over their head, especially in America's booming cities, where rapid growth is leading to catastrophic displacement. These families are being forced into homelessness not by a failing economy, but a thriving one. In this gripping and deeply reported book, Brian Goldstone plunges readers into the lives of five Atlanta families struggling to remain housed in a gentrifying, increasingly unequal city. By turns heartbreaking and urgent, There Is No Place for Us illuminates the true magnitude, causes, and consequences of the new American homelessness--and shows that it won't be solved until housing is treated as a fundamental human right.
2026 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction
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A Case of Mice and Murder: The Trials of Gabriel Wardby Sally SmithWhen barrister Gabriel Ward steps out of his rooms at exactly two minutes to seven on a sunny May morning in 1901, his mind is so full of his latest case--the disputed authorship of bestselling children's book Millie the Temple Church Mouse--that he scarcely registers the body of the Lord Chief Justice of England on his doorstep. But even he cannot fail to notice the judge's dusty bare feet, in shocking contrast to his flawless evening dress, nor the silver carving knife sticking out of his chest. In the shaded courtyards and ancient buildings of the Inner Temple, the hidden heart of London's legal world, murder has spent centuries confined firmly to the casebooks. Until now...
2026 British Book Award Winner for Crime & Thriller
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Under the Neon Lights by Arriel VinsonSixteen-year-old Jaelyn Coleman lives for Saturdays at WestSide Roll, the iconic neighborhood roller rink. On these magical nights, Jae can lose herself in the music of DJ Sunny, the smell of nachos from the concession, and the crowd of some of her favorite people. Here, Jae and other Black teens can fully be themselves. One Saturday, as Jae skates away her worries, she crashes into the cutest boy she’s ever seen. Just as Jae thinks her summer might change for the better, devastating news hits: Westside Roll is shutting down. The gentrification rapidly taking over her predominantly Black Indianapolis neighborhood, filling it with luxury apartments and fancy boutiques, has come for her safe-haven.
2026 John Steptoe New Talent Author
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The Mind Electric: A Neurologist on the Strangeness and Wonder of Our Brains
by Pria Anand
In The Mind Electric, neurologist Pria Anand reveals--through case study, history, fable, and memoir--all that the medical establishment has overlooked: the complexity and wonder of brains in health and in extremis, and the vast gray area between sanity and insanity, doctor and patient, and illness and wellness, each separated from the next by the thin veneer of a different story. Moving from the Boston hospital where she treats her patients, to her childhood years in India, to Isla Providencia in the Caribbean and to the Republic of Guinea in West Africa, she demonstrates again and again the compelling paradox at the heart of neurology: that even the most peculiar symptoms can show us something universal about ourselves as humans.
2026 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award
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To Slip the Bonds of Earth: A Riveting Mystery Based on a True History
by Amanda Flower
December 1903: While Wilbur and Orville Wright's flying machine is
quite literally taking off in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina with its historic fifty-seven second flight, their sister Katharine is back home in Dayton, Ohio, running the bicycle shop, teaching Latin, and looking after the family. A Latin teacher and suffragette, Katharine is fiercely independent, intellectual, and the only Wright sibling to finish college.
But at twenty-nine, she’s frustrated by the gender inequality in academia and is looking for a new challenge. She never suspects it will be sleuthing…
2025 Agatha Award for Best Historical Mystery Novel
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Razorblade Tearsby S.A. CosbyIke Randolph has been out of jail for fifteen years, with not so much as a speeding ticket in all that time. But a Black man with cops at the door knows to be afraid. The last thing he expects to hear is that his son Isiah has been murdered, along with Isiah's white husband, Derek. Ike had never fully accepted his son but is devastated by his loss. Derek's father Buddy Lee was almost as ashamed of Derek for being gay as Derek was ashamed of his father's criminal record. Buddy Lee still has contacts in the underworld, though, and he wants to know who killed his boy. Ike and Buddy Lee, two ex-cons with little else in common other than a criminal past and a love for their dead sons, band together in their desperate desire for revenge.
2022 Barry Award Winner for Best Mystery/Crime Novel
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The Secret Keepers of Old Depot Grocery
by Amanda Cox
For decades, three generations of women of Old Depot Grocery have been keeping secrets from each other. When Sarah returns home with hopes of running the store, the long-buried past will be brought into the light and threaten not only to destroy the family business but sever the family ties.
2022 Christy Award Book of the Year
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The Deepby Rivers SolomonYetu the historian holds the memories for her people--water-dwelling descendants of pregnant African slave women thrown overboard by slave owners--who live idyllic lives in the deep. Their past, too traumatic to be remembered regularly is forgotten by everyone, save one--the historian. Yetu remembers for everyone, and the memories, painful and wonderful, traumatic and terrible and miraculous, are destroying her. And so, she flees to the surface escaping the memories, the expectations, and the responsibilities--and discovers a world her people left behind long ago. If they are all to survive, they'll need to reclaim the memories, and their identity, and own who they really are.
2020 Lambda Literary Award for Speculative Fiction
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Forsyth County Public Library
660 W. Fifth St., Winston-Salem, NC 27101
336-703-2665forsythlibrary.org |
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