A Word About Awards

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...

ALL FOURS by Miranda July   Nominations: LA Times Finalist 2024, National Book Finalist 2024, NY Times Finalist 2024, PEN/Jean Stein Longlist 2025, Women’s Prize Finalist 2025   Date Read: March 28, 2025   From Kirkus Reviews: “A  woman set to embark on a cross-country road trip instead drives to a nearby motel and becomes obsessed with a local man. According to Harris, the husband of the narrator of July’s novel, everyone in life is either a Parker or a Driver. “Drivers,” Harris says, “are able to maintain awareness and engagement even when life is boring.” The narrator knows she’s a Parker, someone who needs “a discrete task that seems impossible, something…for which they might receive applause.” For the narrator, a “semi-famous” bisexual woman in her mid-40s living in Los Angeles, this task is her art; it’s only by haphazard chance that she’s fallen into a traditional straight marriage and motherhood. When the narrator needs to be in New York for work, she decides...

JAZZ by Toni Morrison   Award: Nobel Winner 1992   Nomination: NY Times Finalist 1992   Date Read: March 27, 2025   From Kirkus Reviews: “ Morrison, in her sixth novel, enters 1926 Harlem, a new black world then ("safe from fays [whites] and the things they think up"), and moves into a love story—with a love that could clear a space from the past, give a life or take one. At 50, Joe Trace—good-looking, faithful to wife Violet, also from Virginia poor times—suddenly tripped into a passionate affair with Dorcas, 18: "one of those deep-down spooky loves that made him so sad and happy he shot her just to keep the feeling going." Then Violet went to Dorcas's funeral and cut her dead face. But before Joe met Dorcas, and before her death and before Violet, in her torn coat, scoured the neighborhood looking for reasons, looking for her own truer identity, images of the past burned within all three: Violet's mother, tipped out of her chair by the men who took everyth...