Fiction Addiction’s Blog

The nominees for the 2008 Thriller Awards, sponsored by the International Thriller Writers, are:

Best Novel

• No Time for Goodbye by Linwood Barclay
• The Watchman by Robert Crais
• The Ghost by Robert Harris
• The Crime Writer by Gregg Hurwitz
• Trouble by Jesse Kellerman

Best First Novel

• Interred With Their Bones by Jennifer Lee Carrell
• Big City, Bad Blood by Sean Chercover
• From the Depths by Gerry Doyle
• Volk’s Game by Brent Ghelfi
• Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill

Best Paperback Original

• The Last Nightingale by Anthony Flacco
• A Thousand Bones by P.J. Parrish
• The Midnight Road by Tom Piccirilli
• The Queen of Bedlam by Robert McCammon
• Shattered by Jay Bonansinga

In 1999, the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance (SIBA) launched the SIBA Book Awards, which honors the best in Southern literature in 5 categories: Cooking, Children’s, Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry. 

Beginning this year, the SIBA Awards Ceremony will be held at the Decatur Book Festival over Labor Day weekend in Decatur, GA.

View the long list of nominees and vote for the future winners. If you guess the correct Award winner in each of the five categories, you’ll be entered to win a prize.

The American Library Assocation has announced its 2008 Newbery and Caldecott Award winners and both choices are somewhat surprising. 

The Randolph Caldecott Medal for most distinguished American picture book for children was awarded to The Invention of Hugo Cabret (Scholatic, hardcover, $22.99), a 550- page novel in words and pictures, by Brian Selznick. The story revolves around a boy at the turn of the 20th century who lives in a Paris train station and a mystery involving invention. This is the first time that a full-length novel has won the coveted award.

The John Newbery Medal for most outstanding contribution to children’s literature was awarded to dark horse candidate Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!: Voices from a Medieval Village by Laura Amy Schlitz (Candlewick Press, hardcover, $19.99). The book offers 22 monologues by characters from a medieval English village. Schlitz, a Baltimore school librarian, wrote the pieces for her students to perform.

The Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance (SIBA) gives a yearly award to recognize great books of Southern origin. Books are nominated in several categories, including fiction, nonfiction, poetry, cooking, and children’s. For a book to be eligible, it must be set in the South, and it must have been published within the previous calendar year. In order to promote diversity in the award, no author can win the award in the same category twice.

Books can be nominated by SIBA-member booksellers, but stores can submit nominations on behalf of their customers, so feel free to email us with a suggested nomination.

See the list of current nominations (scroll to the bottom of the page).

For the 3rd year, James Patterson has pledged $250,000 in prize money for the James Patterson PageTurner Awards. The awards are open to US and Canadian residents and are intended to celebrate those people, companies, schools and other institutions who find original and effective ways to spread the excitement of books and reading. The deadline for nominations is December 9th, 2007.

The 2007 National Book Awards have been announced. The winners are:

Fiction: The Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson
Nonfiction: Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA by Tim Weiner
Poetry: Time and Materials by Robert Hass
Young People’s Lit: The Absolute True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie