2013 Book Award Winners
Adam Johnson won the Pulitzer for The Orphan Master's Son, set inside North Korea. Eleanor Catton won the Booker for The Luminaries at twenty eight, James McBride took the National Book Award for The Good Lord Bird, and Alice Munro received the Nobel Prize in Literature.
19 prizes awarded · 2 notable books that won nothing · Pulitzer Prize for Fiction to Nobel Prize in Literature
Winners
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The Orphan Master's Son
Pak Jun Do grows up in a North Korean orphanage his father runs, which technically makes him not an orphan, a distinction nobody else observes. He...
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The Luminaries
Hokitika, New Zealand, January 1866, at the height of the West Coast gold rush. Walter Moody arrives off a bad crossing and walks into a hotel...
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The Good Lord Bird
Henry Shackleford is ten or so, enslaved in a Kansas Territory tavern in 1856, when Old John Brown himself blows in, gets Henry's father killed in...
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May We Be Forgiven
Harold Silver is a mild Nixon scholar, teaching a course nobody takes, married to a woman who barely notices him, and standing in the kitchen at...
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Devil in the Grove
Gilbert King reconstructs the 1949 case of the Groveland Boys, four young Black men in Lake County, Florida accused of raping a white woman on...
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Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam
Fredrik Logevall opens Embers of War at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, where a young Ho Chi Minh petitioned unsuccessfully for Vietnamese self...
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The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo
Tom Reiss follows Thomas Alexandre Dumas from his 1762 birth in the French colony of Saint Domingue, now Haiti, the son of a French nobleman and...
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The Unwinding
The Unwinding is George Packer's inner history of America from the late 1970s to the aftermath of the financial crisis, the decades in which, as...
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The Pike
Gabriele D'Annunzio was the most famous writer in Italy, a poet and novelist of genuine gifts, and one of the most preposterous and dangerous men...
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The Particle at the End of the Universe
On the fourth of July 2012, in a lecture theatre at CERN with champagne waiting, physicists announced they had found the Higgs boson, the last...
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Stag's Leap
Stag's Leap is the book Sharon Olds wrote when her husband of thirty years left her for another woman, and it may be the most complete anatomy of a...
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Parallax
Parallax is named for the optical fact that an object appears to shift when the eye observing it moves, and Sinéad Morrissey builds a whole poetics...
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Redshirts: A Novel with Three Codas
Ensign Andrew Dahl is assigned to the Universal Union flagship Intrepid and notices within a fortnight that something is wrong with the place. Away...
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Ancillary Justice
Breq is one body walking across an ice planet with a weapon and a grudge. She used to be the Justice of Toren, a troop carrier with a distributed...
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Doctor Sleep
Danny Torrance got out of the Overlook Hotel alive at five, and the novel's opening movements answer the question King's readers had asked for...
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Live by Night
Joe Coughlin is a police captain's son who has chosen the other side of the ledger: Boston, the twenties, Prohibition running the city's real...
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The One and Only Ivan
Ivan is a silverback gorilla who narrates his own story from a cramped glass enclosure at the Exit 8 Big Top Mall and Video Arcade, where he has...
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This Is Not My Hat
A small fish steals a tiny blue hat off the head of a much larger, sleeping fish and swims away congratulating himself the whole time, narrating in...
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Dear Life
Dear Life gathers fourteen stories, most of them set in the small town southwestern Ontario landscape Alice Munro had already spent a career...
What Shaped 2013
Munro's Nobel went to a writer who published almost nothing but short stories across fifty years, and the Academy called her a master of the contemporary short story, which settled an old argument about whether the form is a lesser one. Catton remains the youngest Booker winner, and The Luminaries, structured on astrological charts and running to more than eight hundred pages, is the longest book to win. Edward Snowden's disclosures about mass surveillance began in June.
Published in 2013, Won Nothing
Prize committees miss books every year. These came out in 2013 and took no major award.
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No major prizeLife After Life
Ursula Todd is born on a snowy night in February 1910 outside Chalfont St Peter, and dies almost immediately, strangled by her own umbilical cord....
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No major prizeThe Ocean at the End of the Lane
A middle aged man returns to Sussex for a funeral and finds himself drawn down a familiar lane to a farm he has not consciously thought about in...