2007 Book Award Winners
Cormac McCarthy won the Pulitzer for The Road. Anne Enright won the Booker for The Gathering, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie won the Women's Prize for Half of a Yellow Sun, and Doris Lessing received the Nobel at eighty seven.
19 prizes awarded · 2 notable books that won nothing · Pulitzer Prize for Fiction to Nobel Prize in Literature
Winners
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The Road
A man and his young son push a shopping trolley south along a road through an America destroyed by an event the novel never names. Ash covers...
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The Gathering
Liam Hegarty has walked into the sea at Brighton with stones in his pockets. His sister Veronica goes to England to collect the body, and the novel...
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Tree of Smoke
Skip Sands joins the CIA in 1965 a believer: in the war coming in Vietnam, in the agency, and above all in his uncle, Colonel Francis Xavier Sands,...
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Half of a Yellow Sun
The early sixties first: Ugwu, a village boy of thirteen, arrives as houseboy to Odenigbo, a mathematics lecturer at Nsukka whose evenings fill...
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The Looming Tower
Lawrence Wright builds The Looming Tower around the people whose choices led to September 11 rather than around the attack itself, which the book...
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The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation
Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff argue in The Race Beat that the civil rights movement could not have succeeded without the journalists who covered...
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The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher
Debby Applegate follows Henry Ward Beecher from a childhood as the eighth of Lyman Beecher's thirteen children, brother to Harriet Beecher Stowe,...
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Legacy of Ashes
Legacy of Ashes is a history of the Central Intelligence Agency from its founding in 1947 to the wreckage of the Iraq intelligence failures, and...
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Imperial Life in the Emerald City
The Emerald City was the Green Zone: four square miles of Baghdad walled off behind blast barriers after the 2003 invasion, where the Coalition...
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Stumbling on Happiness
Gilbert's subject is the human specialty nobody else in the animal kingdom shares: we spend our lives imagining our futures, and we are...
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Native Guard
Native Guard weaves a personal elegy for Natasha Trethewey's murdered mother together with the buried history of the Louisiana Native Guards, an...
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The Drowned Book
The Drowned Book is soaked through: its poems move among rivers, rain, canals, culverts, flooded cellars, and the underworld those waters have...
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Rainbows End
Robert Gu was a celebrated and thoroughly unpleasant poet who lost his mind to Alzheimer's disease. Medicine catches up, his mind is returned to...
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The Yiddish Policemen's Union
The premise is a single change to history. In 1940 the United States opens Alaska to Jewish refugees, so the destroyed millions instead arrive in...
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The Missing
Corpus Christi, Maine, is the town that made it: white collar, complacent, quietly cruel in the way of comfortable places, and downwind of Bedford,...
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The Janissary Tree
Istanbul, 1836: the Ottoman Empire is ten years past the Auspicious Incident, the day the sultan turned his artillery on his own Janissaries, the...
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The Higher Power of Lucky
Ten year old Lucky Trimble lives in Hard Pan, California, population forty three, in a trailer she shares with Brigitte, her father's French first...
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Flotsam
A boy at the beach finds an old fashioned camera washed up in the surf and, once he gets the film developed, discovers it holds photographs of an...
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The Golden Notebook
Anna Wulf is a writer living in London, and rather than keep one diary she keeps four, each one holding a different, deliberately separated part of...
What Shaped 2007
Lessing was the oldest laureate the literature prize has had, and she was photographed hearing the news on her doorstep after a shopping trip, responding with an exasperation that delighted everyone. McCarthy's The Road, a father and son walking through a burned country, became the rare postapocalyptic novel to win a major literary prize and was chosen by Oprah's book club the same year. Adichie's novel of the Biafran war made her a defining voice of a new African generation.
Published in 2007, Won Nothing
Prize committees miss books every year. These came out in 2007 and took no major award.
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No major prizeA Thousand Splendid Suns
Mariam grows up outside Herat, the illegitimate daughter of a wealthy businessman, Jalil, who visits her and her embittered mother Nana only...
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No major prizeThe Reluctant Fundamentalist
Over a single evening in a Lahore cafe, a bearded Pakistani man named Changez tells an unnamed, visibly nervous American stranger the story of his...