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2020 Nobel Prize Winner for Literature - Louise Glück
Booker Prize Winner
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Shuggie Bain by Douglas StuartISBN: 9780802148049
Publication Date: 2020-02-11
Shuggie Bain is the unforgettable story of young Hugh "Shuggie" Bain, a sweet and lonely boy who spends his 1980s childhood in run-down public housing in Glasgow, Scotland. Thatcher's policies have put husbands and sons out of work, and the city's notorious drugs epidemic is waiting in the wings. A heartbreaking story of addiction, sexuality, and love, Shuggie Bain is an epic portrayal of a working-class family that is rarely seen in fiction. Recalling the work of Édouard Louis, Alan Hollinghurst, Frank McCourt, and Hanya Yanagihara, it is a blistering debut by a brilliant novelist who has a powerful and important story to tell.
International Booker Prize Winner
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The Discomfort of Evening by Marieke Lucas RijneveldISBN: 9781644450345
Publication Date: 2020-08-18
A stark and gripping tale of childhood grief from one of the most exciting new voices in Dutch literature Ten-year-old Jas lives with her strictly religious parents and her siblings on a dairy farm where waste and frivolity are akin to sin. Despite the dreary routine of their days, Jas has a unique way of experiencing her world. One icy morning, the disciplined rhythm of her family's life is ruptured by a tragic accident, and Jas is convinced she is to blame. A bestseller in the Netherlands, Marieke Lucas Rijneveld's radical debut novel The Discomfort of Evening offers readers a rare vision of rural and religious life in the Netherlands. In it, they ask: In the absence of comfort and care, what can the mind of a child invent to protect itself? And what happens when that is not enough? With stunning psychological acuity and images of haunting, violent beauty, Rijneveld has created a captivating world of language unlike any other.
International Booker Prize Shortlist
Sahitya Akademi Award Winner
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When God Is a Traveller by Arundhathi SubramaniamISBN: 9781780371160
Publication Date: 2014-11-20
Here are poems that celebrate an expanding kinship: of passion and friendship, mythic quest and modern-day longing, in a world animated by dialogue and dissent, delirium and silence. Circling themes of intimacy and time, they return to the urgency of conversation: that fragile bridge across the frozen attitudes that divide our world. But at the heart of the collection is a deeper preoccupation, with those blurry places where humans might walk with gods, where the body might touch the beyond, where the enchanted might intersect effortlessly with the everyday. Where one stumbles upon what the poet simply calls 'love without a story'. Arundhathi Subramaniam's previous book from Bloodaxe, When God Is a Traveller, was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Love Without a Story is her fourth collection of poetry. Her earlier work is available in Where I Live: New & Selected Poems.
Alfaguara Prize Winner
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Salvar el fuego by Guillermo ArriagaISBN: 8420439304
Publication Date: 2020
La llama de un fósforo dura solo unos segundos, pero es capaz de incendiar un bosque.» Salvar el fuego es una historia que explora la capacidad de los seres humanos para cruzar las fronteras de la locura, el deseo y la venganza. Marina es una coreógrafa, casada, con tres hijos y una vida convencional. José Cuauhtémoc proviene de los extremos de la sociedad, un homicida condenado a cincuenta años de cárcel, un león detrás del cristal, siempre amenazante y listo para atacar. Entre ambos se desarrolla una relación improbable. Poco a poco, ella entra en un mundo desconocido y brutal hasta que desciende a las entrañas mismas del fuego. De tintes shakespearianos, ritmo trepidante y gran tensión, esta novela relata las paradojas de un país y las contradicciones más feroces del amor y la esperanza. Con esta obra escrita desde diversos puntos de vista y en diferentes tiempos, Arriaga se sitúa entre los escritores más arriesgados y apasionantes de la literatura actual. «Narra con intensidad y dinamismo una historia de violencia en el México contemporáneo donde el amor y la redención aún son posibles. El autor se sirve tanto de una extraordinaria fuerza visual como de la recreación y reinvención del lenguaje coloquial para lograr una obra de inquietante verosimilitud.
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction Finalists
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction Winner
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The Nickel Boys by Colson WhiteheadISBN: 9780345804341
Publication Date: 2020-06-30
In this Pulitzer Prize-winning, New York Times bestselling follow-up to The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead brilliantly dramatizes another strand of American history through the story of two boys unjustly sentenced to a hellish reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida. When Elwood Curtis, a black boy growing up in 1960s Tallahassee, is unfairly sentenced to a juvenile reformatory called the Nickel Academy, he finds himself trapped in a grotesque chamber of horrors. Elwood's only salvation is his friendship with fellow "delinquent" Turner, which deepens despite Turner's conviction that Elwood is hopelessly naive, that the world is crooked, and that the only way to survive is to scheme and avoid trouble.
Pulitzer Prize for Poetry Finalists
Pulitzer Prize for Poetry Winner
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The Tradition by Jericho BrownISBN: 9781556594861
Publication Date: 2019-04-02
Jericho Brown's daring new bookThe Tradition details the normalization of evil and its history at the intersection of the past and the personal. Brown's poetic concerns are both broad and intimate, and at their very core a distillation of the incredibly human: What is safety? Who is this nation? Where does freedom truly lie? Brown makes mythical pastorals to question the terrors to which we've become accustomed, and to celebrate how we survive. Poems of fatherhood, legacy, blackness, queerness, worship, and trauma are propelled into stunning clarity by Brown's mastery, and his invention of the duplex--a combination of the sonnet, the ghazal, and the blues--is testament to his formal skill.The Tradition is a cutting and necessary collection, relentless in its quest for survival while reveling in a celebration of contradiction.
Women's Prize for Fiction Shortlist
Women's Prize for Fiction Winner
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Hamnet by Maggie O'FarrellISBN: 9780525657606
Publication Date: 2020-07-21
England, 1580: The Black Death creeps across the land, an ever-present threat, infecting the healthy, the sick, the old and the young, alike. The end of days is near, but life always goes on. A young Latin tutor--penniless and bullied by a violent father--falls in love with an extraordinary, eccentric young woman. Agnes is a wild creature who walks her family's land with a falcon on her glove and is known throughout the countryside for her unusual gifts as a healer, understanding plants and potions better than she does people. Once she settles with her husband on Henley Street in Stratford-upon-Avon she becomes a fiercely protective mother and a steadfast, centrifugal force in the life of her young husband, whose career on the London stage is taking off when his beloved young son succumbs to sudden fever.
Kobzar Literary Award Winner
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Our Familiar Hunger by Laisha RosnauISBN: 9780889713444
Publication Date: 2018-09-15
This Familiar Hunger is a book about the strength, will, struggle and fortitude of generations of women and how those relationships and knowledges interact, inform, transform and burden. These poems are memories of reclaimed history and attempts at starting over in a new place. They are the fractured reality of trickle-down inheritance, studies of the epigenetic grief we carry and the myriad ways that interferes or interprets our best attempts.