National Book Award

Given by the National Book Foundation as part of its efforts in promoting reading and raising funds for literacy programs.

The Finalists

Dan Chaon
Among the Missing

Jennifer Egan
Look At Me

Louise Erdrich
The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

Susan Straight
Highwire Moon

The Corrections
by Jonathan Franzen
Farrar Straus Giroux, hc, $26.00 buy

The Corrections is a grandly entertaining novel for the new century -- a comic, tragic masterpiece about a family breaking down in an age of easy fixes.

Stretching from the Midwest at midcentury to the Wall Street and Eastern Europe of today, The Corrections brings an old-fashioned world of civic virtue and sexual inhibitions into violent collision with the era of home surveillance, hands-off parenting, do-it-yourself mental healthcare, and globalized greed. Richly realistic, darkly hilarious, deeply humane, it confirms Jonathan Franzen as one of our most brilliant interpreters of American society and the American soul. (book description)

The Finalists

Marie Arana, American Chica: Two World, One Childhood

Nina Bernstein, The Lost Children of Wilder: the Epic Struggle to Change Foster Care

David James Duncan, My Story as Told by Water

Jan T. Gross, Neighbors: the Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland

The Noonday Demon: an Atlas of Depression
by Andrew Solomon
Touchstone Books, pb, $16.00 buy

The Noonday Demon examines depression in personal, cultural, and scientific terms. Drawing on his own struggles with the illness and interviews with fellow sufferers, doctors and scientists, policy makers and politicians, drug designers and philosophers, Andrew Solomon reveals the subtle complexities and sheer agony of the disease. He confronts the challenge of defining the illness and describes the vast range of available medications, the efficacy of alternative treatments, and the impact the malady has on various demographic populations -- around the world and throughout history. He also explores the thorny patch of moral and ethical questions posed by emerging biological explanations for mental illness. With uncommon humanity, candor, wit, and erudition, award-winning author Solomon takes readers on a journey of incom-parable range and resonance into the most pervasive of family secrets. His contribution to our understanding not only of mental illness but also of the human condition is truly stunning. (book description)

The Finalists

Agha Shahid Ali, Rooms Are Never Finished

Wanda Coleman, Mercurochrome

Cornelius Eady, Brutal Imagination

Gail Mazur, They Can't Take That Away From Me

Poems Seven: New and Complete Poetry
by Alan Dugan
Seven Stories Press, hc, $35.00 buy

In this complete collection that tracks his 40-year career and its shifting concerns, Alan Dugan -- winner of the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the Prix de Rome from the National Institute of Arts and Letters -- adds to his legend with nearly three dozen new poems. Dugan spent World War II in the Army Air Corps, and several of his early poems are wry testaments to the somber business of modern warfare. Others plumb the depths of existential angst with bracing black humor and brio.

The Finalists

Kate DiCamillo, The Tiger Rising

Phillip Hoose, We Were There, Too! Young People in U.S. History

An Na, A Step From Heaven

Marilyn Nelson, Carver: A Life in Poems

True Believer: a Novel in the Make Lemonade Trilogy
by Virginia Euwer Wolff
Atheneum, hc, $17.00 buy

"We have a multitude of obstacles to overcome here.
We'll begin."

When LaVaughn was little, the obstacles in her life didn't seem so bad. If she had a fight with Myrtle or Annie, it would never last long. If she was mad at her mother, they made up by bedtime. School was simple. Boys were buddies. Everything made sense.

But LaVaughn is fifteen and the obstacles aren't going away anymore. Big questions separate her from her friends. Her mother is distracted by a new man. School could slip away from her so easily. And the boy who's a miracle in her life acts just as if he's in love with her. Only he's not in love with her.

Returning to the characters and language she explored so profoundly in Make Lemonade, Virginia Euwer Wolff rises to the occasion in this astonishing second of three novels about LaVaughn, her family, and her community.