Looking for a quality read this mid-winter? The National Book Critics Circle have chosen their yearly winners’ circle of the “finest books published in English”.  So with that quality assurance combined with the number of winning titles available at OPL, your Winter reading pleasure should be guaranteed! Just follow the links below to the library’s catalogue pages. 

   The NBCC award for fiction lists our very own Canadian poetry and short story writer Souvankham Thammavongsa, whose collection of short stories: How to Pronounce Knife won the 2020 Scotiabank Giller Prize. In their non-fiction category there’s a book about one of the most extraordinary cultural influence on our times:  She Come by It Natural; Dolly Parton and the women who lived her songs, by Sarah Marsh.  Winning biographical subjects range from Sylvia Plath to John Maynard Keynes and Malcolm X. 

  NBCC Fiction Winners:

Martin Amis, Inside Story (Knopf); Randall Kenan, If I Had Two Wings (W.W. Norton); Maggie O’Farrell, Hamnet (Knopf); Souvankham Thammavongsa, How to Pronounce Knife (Little, Brown); Bryan Washington, Memorial (Riverhead). 

 Non-Fiction Winners:

Walter Johnson, The Broken Heart of America: St, Louis and the Violent History of the United States (Basic); James Shapiro, Shakespeare in a Divided America: What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future (Penguin Press); Sarah Smarsh, She Come by It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs (Scribner); Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent (Random House); Tom Zoellner, Island on Fire: The Revolt That Ended Slavery in the British Empire (Harvard Univ. Press).  

 NBCC Biography Winners:

Amy Stanley, Stranger in the Shogun’s City: A Japanese Woman and Her World (Scribner); Zachary D. Carter, The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes (Random House); Heather Clark, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath (Knopf); Les Payne, Tamara Payne, The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X (Liveright); Maggie Doherty, The Equivalents: A Story of Art, Female Friendship, and Liberation in the 1960s (Knopf).