7 Prize-Winning Books You Won't Be Able To Put Down (2024)

The winner that blows your mind -- and opens your heart

This story collection -- and winner of the National Book Award in fiction -- is full of characters that challenge and perplex. They are not like you, probably -- and yet, as a reader, you feel compelled to find out what drives them. In the title piece, two North Korean defectors miss their rigid homeland. Later, a former East German prison warden dreams of his old job tormenting citizens; a father tries to reassemble his family after being whipsawed by Hurricane Katrina; and, an ailing woman takes strange comfort in a hologram of the President. Expect emotional intelligence from these characters, yes. But also humor. "I appreciate democracy, freedom and the variety of television programming," says a North Korean defector resettling in Seoul. "But I do miss how dark it used to get." A smart, surprising read.

-- Mark Athitakis

The winner you may never have heard of—but need to read

Ta-Nehisi Coates' piercing contemplation of race in America, winner of the National Book Award in nonfiction, starts out from a place of righteous fury and never lets up. "Last Sunday the host of a popular news show asked what it meant to lose my body," he begins, sparking a discussion on the many ways black men and women have been treated cheaply. Coates is a rigorous student of America's long history of racism, from slavery to lynching to redlining. ("In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body -- it is heritage.") But Coates keeps you turning the pages because he's so willing to get intimate and personal about the subject, never more so than when he describes the death of a close friend who was killed by a police officer who mistook him for a criminal. His book is a brutal and poignant message about how far we have yet to go to achieve equality.

— Mark Athitakis

The winner with page-turning appeal

James' slangy, whip-smart novel -- the winner of the Man Booker Prize, the biggest literary prize for books published in the United Kingdom—is on the surface about the 1976 assassination attempt on reggae legend Bob Marley. But as the supersize page count suggests, there's a whole lot more going on, and the longer you immerse yourself in James' rich, propulsive prose and overflowing cast of gangsters and spies, the more you'll feel like you're witnessing a secret history of the second half of the 20th century. The scale is epic and often soaked in wide-screen violence, yet James is also brilliant at intimate portraits of characters like Nina, a lover of Marley's whose harrowing escape from Jamaica to New York exposes just how much a person will sacrifice for freedom.

— Mark Athitakis

The winner that deserves more attention

Most of us know that Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction this year. But on the nonfiction side of the prize, Elizabeth Kolbert's tightly reported The Sixth Extinction is a valuable reminder that the past is often prologue. Her scientific explorations take her from the Andes to the Great Barrier Reef to study how past cataclysms have played out, from dinosaurs to woolly mammoths, and what they might suggest about the future. Her ability to make complex science clear and inviting means you'll be more fascinated by auks and frogs than you thought possible. But thrumming in the background of this story is a sober message: While the past five "mass extinction events" were out of our hands, the sixth will be our doing. Read it to be engaged, a bit frightened and, ultimately, motivated.

— Mark Athitakis

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