Award Winners

The Gold Medallion Book Award: The Gold Medallion Book Award is given for the best Christian books published each year and is given by the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association.

1993 In My Father's House by Bodie Thoene. G.K. Hall, 1993. This story is really several ongoing story lines. They all begin during WWI in Europe and the United States and continue after the war. The stories follow the main characters during the war and following. The key issues involved are gossip, slander, bigotry, racism, religious discrimination, nationality hatred/fears and class biases. We watch as the characters develop and deal with the knocks thrown to them by life during and after the war. Bodie Thoene won the Gold Medallion Book award for fiction in 1993 with In My Father's House. This award is given for the best Christian books published each year and is given by the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association.

Macavity Award: The Macavity Award is named for the "mystery cat" of T. S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. Each year the members of Mystery Readers International nominate and vote for their favorite mysteries in four categories...Best Mystery Novel, Best First Mystery Novel, Best Nonfiction, and Best Mystery Short Story. (1992 Bootlegger’s Daughter).

National Book Awards: The National Book Foundation was founded in 1989, as an outgrowth of the long-established National Book Awards, with a mission to raise the cultural value of great writing in America. In the years since, the Foundation has developed an extensive array of free educational programs across the nation for readers of all ages and backgrounds, such as its Summer Writing camp in the Adirondack Mountains, its Family Literacy workshops in New York City, and its American Voices project at Native American reservations. All of its programs feature National Book Award authors, who seek to foster a love of reading and writing among participants. The winner in each category receives a $10,000 cash award; each finalist receives $1,000. To be eligible for a National Book Award, books must be written by a U.S. citizen and published in the United States between December 1 and November 30 of the next year. Only publishers may submit books for consideration.

1998 Charming Billy by Alice McDermott. Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1998. Charming Billy is a devastating account of the power of longing and lies, love's tenacity, and resignation's hold. Even at his funeral party, Billy Lynch's life remains up for debate. This soft-spoken, poetry lover's drinking was as legendary among his Queens, New York, family and friends as was his disappointment in love. After World War II, Billy & his cousin Dennis had spent one sun-swept week on Long Island, renovating a house and falling in with two Irish sisters--nannies to a wealthy family. By the end of their idyll, Billy and Eva were engaged, though she was set to return to County Wicklow. Determined to earn enough money to bring her, her family, and if necessary her entire village back to the U.S., Billy took two jobs, one of which would indenture him for years. But despite the money he sent, Eva never returned, and then was suddenly dead of pneumonia. The true tragedy is that she had simply kept her fare and married someone else--a secret Dennis keeps for the next 30 years as he watches Billy fall into a loveless marriage and the self-administered anesthesia of alcohol. As Dennis's daughter pieces together Billy's real history, she also learns of the accommodations her own family had long made--and discovers that good intentions can be as destructive as the truth they mean to hide.

National Book Critics Circle Award: The National Book Critics Circle, consisting of nearly 700 active book reviewers, each year presents awards for the finest books in five categories: fiction, biography/autobiography, general non-fiction, poetry and criticism. Prior to 1997, the award was limited to an American citizens, when the eligibility rules changed to include all authors of the best books published in the United States, regardless of nationality.

1975 Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow. Random House, 1975. Ragtime interweaves the lives of an upper-middle-class white family, a poor immigrant family and the family of a black ragtime musician with such historical figures as J.P. Morgan, Harry Houdini, Henry Ford, Emma Goldman and Evelyn Nesbitt in early twentieth century America. Winner of the 1975 National Book Critics Circle Award, Ragtime is a wonderful novel full of American history and culture in the 1910s.

1991 A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley. Alfred A Knopf, 1991. The 1992 Pulitzer Prize Winner for fiction, and the 1991 National Book Critics Circle Award Winner. A father, his three daughters and their friends and relations on an Iowa farm of about A Thousand Acres will have you wondering what could possibly happen next as this story unfolds. The father suddenly decides to stop farming and gives his land to his daughters Ginny, Rose, and Caroline. Perceived irrational acts by the father and daughters start a chain reaction of events and a dredging up of old memories and old wounds that will keep this story in your mind for a long time after reaching the end of the book. Told from the perspective of the oldest daughter, this story is considered to be a modern day version of Shakespeare's King Lear. Read it and decide for yourself.

1998 I Will Bear Witness by Victor Kemperer. Random House, 998(vol.1), 1999 (vol.2 – this volume was a nominee for the National Book Critics Circle Awards for Biography and Autobiography in 2000.). As Hitler's Third Reich began in 1933, Victor Klemperer, a Jew, was head of the department of Romance Languages at the University of Dresden. He was married to an Aryan Protestant, Eva. They had no children. He determined to keep (often despite great danger) a daily diary of their lives as the Nazi campaign against the Jews escalated. The Klemperers survived the war, and in 1960, following Victor's death, the diaries were uncovered and published in Germany. This is a riveting account of the thousands of small daily tyrannies--"the bites of a thousand mosquitoes equals a blow on the head."-- inflicted upon the German Jews and how this couple survived them.

PEN/Faulkner Awards for Fiction: Founded in 1980, the PEN/Faulkner Award is named for the writer’s organization PEN (Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists, Novelists) and the Nobel-prize winning author William Faulkner. The PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, valued at $15,000, is given annually to an American author for a novel or short story collection. Since 1990, the awards have been funded by an endowment that was created by the PEN/Faulkner Foundation in 1987. The PEN/Faulkner Award is the largest juried prize for fiction in the United States.

1990 Billy Bathgate by E.L. Doctorow. Random House, 1989. In 1930's New York, Billy Bathgate, a fifteen-year-old high school dropout, has captured the attention of infamous gangster Dutch Schultz, who lures the boy into his world of racketeering. The product of an East Bronx upbringing by his half-crazy Irish Catholic mother, after his Jewish father left them long ago, Billy is captivated by the world of money, sex, and high society the charismatic Schultz has to offer. But it is also a world of extortion, brutality, and murder, where Billy finds himself involved in a dangerous affair with Schultz's girlfriend. Converging mythology and history, Doctorow has captured the romance of gangsters and criminal enterprise that continues to fascinate the American psyche today.