Friday Reads: Carnegie Medals for Excellence Longlist
This week, the American Library Association announced the 2024 Carnegie Medals for Excellence longlist. 12 Penguin Random House titles, and its client publishers, made the list. The six-title shortlist—three each for the fiction and nonfiction medals—will be announced on November 14, 2023. The two medal winners will be announced in a livestreaming event at LibLearnX in Baltimore on Saturday, January 20. A celebratory event will take place in June 2024 at the American Library Association’s (ALA) Annual Conference in San Diego. Congratulations to all honorees!
Fiction
Two top women gladiators fight for their freedom within a depraved private prison system not so far-removed from America’s own in this explosive, hotly anticipated debut novel from the New York Times bestselling author of Friday Black.
An aching love story and powerful coming-of-age that reckons with the legacy of British colonialism, the World War II Japanese occupation, and the pursuit of modernity, The Great Reclamation confronts the wounds of progress, the sacrifices of love, and the difficulty of defining home when nature and nation collide, literally shifting the land beneath people’s feet.
From one of contemporary literature’s most exciting new voices, a haunting story centered on the Hungarian polymath John von Neumann, tracing the impact of his singular legacy on the dreams and nightmares of the twentieth century and the nascent age of AI.
A young Indian woman finds the false rumors that she killed her husband surprisingly useful—until other women in the village start asking for her help getting rid of their own husbands—in this razor-sharp debut.
Nonfiction
The “illuminating” (New Yorker) story of the Great Chicago Fire: a raging inferno, a harrowing fight for survival, and the struggle for the soul of a city—told with the “the clarity—and tension—of a well-wrought military narrative” (Wall Street Journal)
Central Park birder Christian Cooper takes us beyond the viral video that shocked a nation and into a world of avian adventures, global excursions, and the unexpected lessons you can learn from a life spent looking up at the birds.
The Pulitzer Prize–winning, bestselling author of Evicted reimagines the debate on poverty, making a sweeping argument about why it persists in America: because the rest of us benefit from it.
A historical thriller by the Pulitzer and National Book Award-winning author that tells the riveting story of the Klan’s rise to power in the 1920s, the cunning con man who drove that rise, and the woman who stopped them.
A witty, winning, and revelatory personal narrative of the author’s transition from sightedness to blindness and his quest to learn about blindness as a rich culture all its own.
Swarns’s journalism has already started a national conversation about universities with ties to slavery. The 272 tells a bigger story, demonstrating how slavery fueled the growth of the Catholic Church in America and bringing to light the enslaved people whose forced labor helped to build the largest religious denomination in the nation.
“A first-rate medical thriller and the searing account of a forgotten American tragedy” Patrick Radden Keefe, author of Say Nothing and Empire of Pain. Wonder Drug is a page-turning account of the most notorious drug of the twentieth century and the never-before-told story of its American survivors.
A photographic and narrative celebration of contemporary Native American life and cultures, alongside an in-depth examination of issues that Native people face, by celebrated photographer and storyteller Matika Wilbur of the Swinomish and Tulalip Tribes.
For more on these titles visit the collection Carnegie Longlist
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