The finalists have been chosen in seven categories for the first Indies Choice Book Awards, the successor awards to the Book Sense Awards. The categories are annoyingly ambiguous: Best Indie Buzz book (fiction), Best Conversation Starter (nonfiction), Best Author Discovery (debut), Best New Picture Book, Best YA Buzz Book, Most Engaging Author, and the Picture Book Hall of Fame. The fact that the first three categories require parenthetical explanations proves my point, I think.The Best Indie Buzz Book (fiction) finalists are:
- City of Thieves, by David Benioff (Viking)
- The Given Day, by Dennis Lehane (Morrow)
- The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Ann Shaffer & Annie Barrows (Dial)
- Netherland, by Joseph O'Neill (Pantheon)
- People of the Book, by Geraldine Brooks (Viking)
- Unaccustomed Earth, by Jhumpa Lahiri (Knopf)
The Best Author Discovery (debut) finalists are:
- Child 44, by Tom Rob Smith (Grand Central)
- The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson (Knopf)
- Mudbound, by Hillary Jordan (Algonquin)
- The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, by David Wroblewski (Ecco)
- The Story of Forgetting, by Stefan Merrill Block (Random House)
- White Tiger, by Aravind Adiga (Free Press)
See the finalists in the other categories here. The finalists were selected from titles appearing on the 2008 Indie Next List Great Reads and Book Sense Picks. The winners will be announced in late April.
1 comment:
The concept of "indie" in music is confusing enough, but I seriously don't see how it meshes with books. Is it books published by an "independent" company? What qualifies? And what qualifies as indie for this award? These are well known books, bestsellers even. And their publishers are big companies. What a strange award... I'll need to investigate this further.
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