A Word About Awards

BESIDE THE OCEAN OF TIME by George MacKay Brown   Nominations: Booker Finalist 1994, Dublin Longlist 1996   Date Read: December 2, 2025   From Graeme Fife Review: “ The great skua is known in the Scottish islands as a bonxie, a Shetland name of Norse origin. He flies low over the sea but think of him cruising into a higher slipstream and circling the string of rocky outcrops that make these other islands, ‘the green hills and the blue waters of Orkney’, the treeless open ground where the men and women of the small population tend the planticrus (walled vegetable patches) and haul up their boats from the chafing sea onto the noust (a scooped-out trench atop a beach, protected by a shallow wall of stones), ready for the next foray into the waters for fish. The low walls are everywhere, sign of the need to win shelter from the wind that sweeps over the low ground, the wind that tosses the bonxie as he espies the pattern of existence that has been the same and changed endless...

ELBOW ROOM by James Alan McPherson   Award: Pulitzer Winner 1978   Nomination: National Book Finalist 1978   Date Read: November 25, 2025     Why I Like Country Music The unnamed narrator of this story enjoys country music because it is nostalgic from his primary school upbringing in South Carolina. Although he is often side-eyed by his wife for his taste in music, the narrator cannot help but focus on a spring event in his youth that called for square dancing. In the 4 th  grade, our narrator was put on the team for square dancing for the spring showcase. He was so mortified to dance in front of his peers that he had his dad wright a note saying he needed to be on the maypole team. While watching the square dancers practicing, he realized how much fun it seemed and that he missed out on an opportunity to dance with his crush, Gwenneth Lawson. On the day of the event, her partner was unable to dance because of spurs on his boots so our hero steps in and was...

BLACK BUTTERFLIES by Priscilla Morris   Nominations: Carnegie Longlist 2025, Dayton Literary Peace Finalist 2025, Womens Prize Finalist 2023   Date Read: November 23, 2025   From Kirkus Reviews (starred): “ The human costs of the siege of Sarajevo in the 1990s are recounted in a compelling debut. Zora, a 55-year-old painter and art instructor, lives a busy life  in Sarajevo with her older husband, Franjo. When, during the early days of the partisan conflict, the family’s equanimity is upset by squatters trying to take possession of Zora’s mother’s apartment, Zora and Franjo decide that he will accompany her mother on an earlier-than-planned visit to their daughter and son-in-law (and beloved granddaughter) in England. Unable to believe or comprehend that the military action beginning to envelope the city will last for very long, Zora stays behind to watch the family’s properties and continue her work. Over the course of the following year, Zora struggles to surv...

DEMON COPPERHEAD by Barbara Kingsolver   Awards: BookTube Winner 2023, James Tait Black Winner 2022, Oprah Book Club 2022, Pulitzer Winner 2023, Women’s Prize Winner 2023   Nominations: Carnegie Longlist 2023, Dublin Longlist 2024, NY Times Finalist 2022   Date Read: September 2, 2025   From Kirkus Reviews: “Inspired by  David Copperfield , Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South. It’s not necessary to have read Dickens’ famous novel to appreciate Kingsolver’s absorbing tale, but those who have will savor the tough-minded changes she rings on his Victorian sentimentality while affirming his stinging critique of a heartless society. Our soon-to-be orphaned narrator’s mother is a substance-abusing teenage single mom who checks out via OD on his 11th birthday, and Demon’s cynical, wised-up voice is light-years removed from David Copperfield’s earnest tone. Yet readers also see the yearning for love and wells of...

FLEISHMAN IS IN TROUBLE By Taffy Brodesser-Akner   Nominations: Carnegie Longlist 2020, National Book Longlist 2019, National Book Critics Circle Finalist 2019, Women’s Prize Longlist 2020   Date Read: August 6, 2025   From Kirkus Reviews: “ It's not like Fleishman's estranged wife, a high-powered talent agent, was ever a very involved mother. But now she's dropped off the kids—while he was  asleep —and disappeared. New York Times Magazine  staff writer Brodesser-Akner's debut novel tracks Manhattan hepatologist Toby Fleishman through a painful divorce whose sting is mitigated somewhat by the wonders of his dating app. "Toby changed his search parameters to thirty-eight to forty-one, then forty to fifty, what the hell, and it was there that he found his gold mine: endlessly horny, sexually curious women who knew their value, who were feeling out something new, and whose faces didn't force him to have existential questions about youth and responsibility." A...

FINGERSMITH by Sarah Waters   Nominations: Booker Finalist 2002, Dublin Longlist 2004, Womens Prize Finalist 2002   Date Read: July 4, 2025   From Kirkus Reviews: “ Imagine a university-educated lesbian Charles Dickens with a similarly keen eye for mendacity and melodrama, and you’ll have some idea of the pleasures lurking in Waters’s impudent revisionist historicals: Tipping the Velvet (1999), Affinity (2000), and now this richly woven tale of duplicity, passion, and lots of other good stuff. It begins as the narrative of 17-year-old Susan Trinder, an orphan resident of the criminal domicile run by Hogarthian Grace Sucksby, a Fagin-like “farmer” of discarded infants and den-mother to an extended family of “fingersmiths” (i.e., pickpockets) and assorted confidence-persons. One of the latter, Richard Rivers (a.k.a. “Gentleman”), engages Susan in an elaborate plot to fleece wealthy old Mr. Lilly, a connoisseur of rare books—as lady’s maid “Susan Smith” t...