 2010
Tinkers by Paul Harding
A powerful celebration of life in which a New England father and son, through suffering and joy, transcend their imprisoning lives and offer new ways of perceiving the world and mortality.
 2009
Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout
Vignettes of life in a small coastal town in Maine. The title character, a middle-aged former teacher, provides the central thread that weaves its way through various stories that share a common time and place.
 2008
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
The novel is an epic story which chronicles not just the "brief wondrous life of Oscar Wao," an overweight Dominican boy growing up in Paterson, New Jersey, but also the curse of the "fuku" that has plagued Oscar's family for generations.
 2007
The Road by Cormac McCarthy The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, "each the other's world entire," are sustained by love.
2006 March by Geraldine Brooks
From Louisa May Alcott's beloved classic Little Women, Geraldine Brooks has animated the character of the absent father, March, and crafted a story, filled with the ache of love and marriage and with the power of war upon the mind and heart of one unforgettable man.
 2005 Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
Twenty-four years after her first novel, Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson returns with an intimate tale of three generations from the Civil War to the twentieth century: a story about fathers and sons and the spiritual battles that still rage at America's heart.
2004 The Known World by Edward P. Jones
In one of the most acclaimed novels in recent memory, Edward P. Jones, two-time National Book Award finalist, tells the story of Henry Townsend, a black farmer and former slave who falls under the tutelage of William Robbins, the most powerful man in Manchester County, Virginia.
 2003 Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
To understand why Calliope is not like other girls, she has to uncover a guilty family secret and the astonishing genetic history that turns Callie into Cal, one of the most audacious and wondrous narrators in contemporary fiction. Lyrical and thrilling, Middlesex is an exhilarating reinvention of the American epic.
2002 Empire Falls by Richard Russo
Miles Roby has been slinging burgers at the Empire Grill for 20 years, a job that cost him his college education and much of his self-respect. What keeps him there?
2000 Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri
Frequently finding themselves in Cambridge, Mass., or similar but unnamed Eastern seaboard university towns, Lahiri's characters suffer on an intimate level the dislocation and disruption brought on by India's tumultuous political history.
 1999 The Hours by Michael Cunningham
In The Hours, Michael Cunningham, widely praised as one of the most gifted writers of his generation, draws inventively on the life and work of Virginia Woolf to tell the story of a group of contemporary characters struggling with the conflicting claims of love and inheritance, hope and despair.
1998 American Pastoral by Philip Roth
As the American century draws to an uneasy close, Philip Roth gives us a novel of unqualified greatness that is an elegy for all our century's promises of prosperity, civic order, and domestic bliss.
 1997 Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer by Steven Millhauser
Young Martin Dressler begins his career as an industrious helper in his father's cigar store. In the course of his restless young manhood, he makes a swift and eventful rise to the top, accompanied by two sisters--one a dreamlike shadow, the other a worldly business partner. |
