Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 2000 to present | Dupont Hadley Middle

1) Night watch: a novel

Author

Phillips, Jayne Anne

Description

"In 1874, in the wake of the Civil War, eleven-year-old ConaLee and her mother arrive at the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in West Virginia. They're delivered to the hospital's entrance by Papa--an abusive veteran who forces himself into their lives--after ConaLee's mother, who hasn't spoken in a year, grows even more withdrawn. Before he departs, Papa assigns them new identities and demands that ConaLee introduce herself as her mother's nurse--not...

Author

Díaz, Hernán

Description

"An award-winning writer of absorbing, sophisticated fiction delivers a stylish and propulsive novel rooted in early 20th century New York, about wealth and talent, trust and intimacy, truth and perception. In glamorous 1920s New York City, two characters of sophisticated taste come together. One is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; the other, the brilliant daughter of penniless aristocrats. Steeped in affluence and grandeur, their marriage excites...

3) Demon Copperhead: a novel

Author

Kingsolver, Barbara

Formats:

Book, CD audio book, Large Print, Playaway

Description

The teenage son of an Appalachian single mother who dies when he is eleven uses his good looks, wit, and instincts to survive foster care, child labor, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses.

4) The Netanyahus: an account of a minor and ultimately even negligible episode in the history of a very famous family

Author

Description

"Corbin College, not-quite-upstate New York, winter 1959-1960: Ruben Blum, a Jewish historian-but not an historian of the Jews-is co-opted onto a hiring committee to review the application of an exiled Israeli scholar specializing in the Spanish Inquisition. When Benzion Netanyahu shows up for an interview, family unexpectedly in tow, Blum plays the reluctant host, to guests who proceed to lay waste to his American complacencies. Mixing fiction with...

5) The Nickel boys: a novel

Author

Whitehead, Colson

Formats:

Book, CD audio book, Kit, Large Print, Playaway

Description

In this bravura follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize, and National Book Award-winning The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead brilliantly dramatizes another strand of American history through the story of two boys sentenced to a hellish reform school in Jim Crow-era Florida. As the Civil Rights movement begins to reach the black enclave of Frenchtown in segregated Tallahassee, Elwood Curtis takes the words of Dr. Martin Luther King to heart: He is "as...

6) The night watchman: a novel

Author

Erdrich, Louise

Formats:

Book, CD audio book, Large Print

Description

It is 1953. Thomas Wazhushk is the night watchman at the first factory to open near the Turtle Mountain Reservation in rural North Dakota. He is also a prominent Chippewa Council member, trying to understand a new bill that is soon to be put before Congress. The US Government calls it an 'emancipation' bill; but it isn't about freedom - it threatens the rights of Native Americans to their land, their very identity. How can he fight this betrayal?00Unlike...

7) The overstory: a novel

Author

Powers, Richard

Description

"An air force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back to life by creatures of air and light. A hearing-and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another. These four, and...

8) Less: a novel

Author

Greer, Andrew Sean

Series

Arthur Less novels volume 1

Formats:

Book, CD audio book, Kit, Large Print

Description

Receiving an invitation to his ex-boyfriend's wedding, Arthur, a failed novelist on the eve of his fiftieth birthday, embarks on an international journey that finds him falling in love, risking his life, reinventing himself, and making connections with the past.

9) The underground railroad: a novel

Author

Whitehead, Colson

Formats:

Book, CD audio book, Kit, Large Print

Description

A magnificent tour de force chronicling a young slave's adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South. Cora is a slave on a cotton plantation in Georgia. When Caesar, a recent arrival from Virginia, tells her about the Underground Railroad, they decide to take a terrifying risk and escape. Though they manage to find a station and head north, they are being hunted. Their first stop is South Carolina, in a city that initially...

10) The sympathizer

Author

Nguyen, Viet Thanh

Series

Thorndike Press large print reviewers' choice

Formats:

Book, Large Print

Description

It is April 1975 and Saigon is in chaos. At his villa, a general of the South Vietnamese army is drinking whiskey and, with the help of his trusted captain, drawing up a list of those who will be given passage aboard the last flights out of the country. The general and his compatriots start a new life in Los Angeles, unaware that one among their number, the captain, is secretly observing and reporting on the group to a higher-up in the Viet Cong....

11) All the light we cannot see

Author

Series

Thorndike Press large print reviewers' choice

Formats:

Book, CD audio book, Large Print

Description

"From the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning Anthony Doerr, a stunningly ambitious and beautiful novel about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II. Marie Laure lives with her father in Paris within walking distance of the Museum of Natural History where he works as the master of the locks (there are thousands of locks in the museum). When she is six,...

12) The Goldfinch

Author

Formats:

Book, CD audio book, Large Print, Playaway

Description

"The author of the classic bestsellers The Secret History and The Little Friend returns with a brilliant, highly anticipated new novel. A young boy in New York City, Theo Decker, miraculously survives an accident that takes the life of his mother. Alone and abandoned by his father, Theo is taken in by a friend's family and struggles to make sense of his new life. In the years that follow, he becomes entranced by one of the few things that reminds...

13) The orphan master's son: a novel

Author

Formats:

Book, CD audio book

Description

The Pulitzer Prize–winning, New York Times betselling novel of North Korea: an epic journey into the heart of the world’s most mysterious dictatorship.
“Imagine Charles Dickens paying a visit to Pyongyang, and you see the canvas on which [Adam] Johnson is painting here.”—The Washington Post
Pak Jun Do is the haunted son of a lost mother—a singer “stolen” to Pyongyang—and

...

14) A visit from the Goon Squad

Author

Series

Visit from the Goon Squad volume 1

Formats:

Book, CD audio book, Playaway

Description

Bennie Salazar, an aging former punk rocker and record executive, and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs confront their pasts in this powerful story about how rebellion ages, influence corrupts, habits turn to addictions, lifelong friendships fluctuate and turn, and how art and music have the power to redeem.

Author

Series

Brilliance Audio on compact disc

Formats:

Book, CD audio book

Description

Paul Harding's Pulitzer Prize–winning and New York Times–bestselling debut novel about memory, consciousness, and our place in the natural world.

An old man lies dying. Confined to bed in his living room, he sees the walls around him begin to collapse, the windows come loose from their sashes, and the ceiling plaster fall off in great chunks, showering him with a lifetime of debris: newspaper clippings, old

...

16) Olive Kitteridge

Author

Strout, Elizabeth

Series

Olive novels volume 1

Formats:

Book, CD audio book, Large Print

Description

At the edge of the continent, in the small town of Crosby, Maine, lives Olive Kitteridge, a retired schoolteacher who deplores the changes in her town and in the world at large but doesn't always recognize the changes in those around her.

17) The brief wondrous life of Oscar Wao

Author

Series

Thorndike Press large print core

Formats:

Book, CD audio book, Large Print

Description

Living with an Old World mother and rebellious sister, an urban New Jersey misfit dreams of becoming the next J.R.R. Tolkien and believes that a longstanding family curse is thwarting his efforts to find love and happiness.

Author

McCarthy, Cormac

Formats:

Book, CD audio book, Large Print, Playaway

Description

In a postapocalyptic world, a father and young son travel together across a blighted America.

19) March: a novel

Author

Brooks, Geraldine

Formats:

Book, Large Print

Description

From the author of the international bestseller "Year of Wonders" comes a powerful love story set against the catastrophe of the Civil War. From Louisa May Alcott's beloved classic "Little Women," Brooks has taken the character of the absent father, March, and added adult resonance to portray the moral complexity of war and a marriage tested by the demands of extreme idealism.

Author

Robinson, Marilynne

Series

Gilead novels volume 1

Formats:

Book, eAudiobook, Large Print, Playaway

Description

In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames's life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Ames is the son of an Iowan preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young man in Maine, saw a vision of Christ bound in chains and came west to Kansas to fight for abolition: He "preached men into the Civil War," then, at age fifty, became a chaplain in the Union Army, losing his right eye in battle. Reverend...