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Features

The 2019 Kirkus Prize

At a special ceremony at the Austin Public Library in Austin, Texas, Kirkus Reviews, the nation’s leading prepublication journal of book reviews, announced the winners of the sixth annual Kirkus Prize in the categories of fiction, nonfiction and young readers’ literature.

Bookreporter.com Reviewers Pick Their Favorite Books of 2019

Recently we asked our reviewers to provide us with a list of some of their favorite books from 2019. Included is a mix of fiction and nonfiction titles, all published this year. Take a moment to read these varied lists of titles and see if you agree with any of their selections! Please note that due to personal and professional commitments, some reviewers were not able to participate in this feature.

Week of June 29, 2020

Paperback releases for the week of June 29th include THE NICKEL BOYS, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Colson Whitehead, who follows up his Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning bestseller THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD with the story of two boys who are sentenced to a hellish reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida; THE YELLOW HOUSE, a haunting memoir from Sarah M. Broom about the inexorable pull of home and family, set in a shotgun house in New Orleans East; a newly updated edition of CATCH AND KILL, in which Ronan Farrow exposes serial abusers and a cabal of powerful interests hell-bent on covering up the truth, at any cost --- from Hollywood to Washington and beyond; and A BETTER MAN, the 15th installment in Louise Penny's long-running series starring Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, who returns to the Sûreté du Québec, only to be greeted by catastrophic spring flooding, blistering attacks in the media and a mysterious disappearance.

Colson Whitehead, author of The Nickel Boys

Abandoned by his parents, but kept on the straight and narrow by his grandmother, Elwood Curtis is about to enroll in Tallahassee’s local black college. But for a black boy in the Jim Crow South of the early 1960s, one innocent mistake is enough to destroy the future. Elwood is sentenced to a juvenile reformatory called the Nickel Academy.