LibGuides: ALA's Notable Books: Current Year

Recent Winners in FICTION: 2025

Anita de Monte Laughs Last: A Novel
by Xochitl Gonzalez Anita de Monte, a rising star in the art world, is found dead in New York City; her tragic death is the talk of the town. Until it isn't.
Call Number: Fict Gon -- New / Popular

ISBN: 9781250786210

Publication Date: 2024-03-05
ELECTRONIC FORMAT:
eBook
Fire Exit
by Morgan Talty From the porch of his home, Charles Lamosway has watched the life he might have had unfold across the river on Maine's Penobscot Reservation. On the far bank, he caught brief moments of his neighbor Elizabeth's life -- from the day she came home from the hospital to her early twenties. But there's always been something deeper and more dangerous than the river that divides him from her and the rest of the tribal community.
Call Number: Fict Tal -- New / Popular

ISBN: 9781959030553

Publication Date: 2024-06-04
James: A Novel
by Percival Everett A retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, both harrowing and ferociously funny, told from the enslaved Jim's point of view
Call Number: Fict Eve -- New / Popular

ISBN: 9780385550369

Publication Date: 2024-03-19
ELECTRONIC FORMAT:
eBook
In Memoriam
by Alice Winn The front is horrific, of course, and though Gaunt tries to dissuade Ellwood from joining him on the battlefield, Ellwood soon rushes to join him, fueled by his education in Greek heroics and romantic wartime poetry. Before long, most of their classmates have followed suit. Once in the trenches, the boys become intimately acquainted with the harsh realities of war.
Call Number: Fict Win -- New / Popular

ISBN: 9780593534564

Publication Date: 2023-03-07
Martyr!
by Kaveh Akbar A newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a search that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum.
Call Number: Fict Akb -- New / Popular

ISBN: 9780593537619

Publication Date: 2024-01-23
Sipsworth: A Novel
by Simon Van Booy Over the course of a single week in a small English village, a widowed octogenarian who has spent her last years alone, ready to die, discovers an unexpected reason to live.
Call Number: Fict Van -- New / Popular

ISBN: 9781567927948

Publication Date: 2024-05-07
ELECTRONIC FORMAT:
eBook
The History of Sound: Stories
by Ben Shattuck A stunning collection of interconnected stories, set mostly in New England, exploring how the past is often misunderstood and how history, family, heartache, and desire can echo over centuries.
Call Number: Fict Sha -- New / Popular

ISBN: 9780593490389

Publication Date: 2024-07-09
Two-Step Devil: A Novel
by Jamie Quatro In 2014, in Lookout Mountain, Alabama, the Prophet - a seventy-year-old man who paints his visions - lives off the grid in a cabin near the Georgia border. He sees a car pull up to an abandoned gas station, and a teenage girl with zip ties on her wrists is in the back seat. He realizes he must rescue her from her current life and he feels certain that she is a messenger sent by God to take his end-time warnings to the White House.
Call Number: Fict Qua -- New / Popular

ISBN: 9780802163134

Publication Date: 2024-09-10
Wandering Stars
by Tommy Orange Traces the legacies of the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 and the Carlisle Industrial School for Indians through to the shattering aftermath of Orvil Redfeather's shooting
Call Number: Fict Ora -- New / Popular

ISBN: 9780593318256

Publication Date: 2024-02-27
Whale Fall
by Elizabeth O'Connor In 1938, a dead whale washes up on the shores of remote Welsh island. For Manod, who has spent her whole life on the island, it feels like both a portent of doom and a symbol of what may lie beyond the island's shores.
Call Number: Fict OCo -- New / Popular

ISBN: 9780593700914

Publication Date: 2024-05-07
Wolf at the Table: A Novel
by Adam Rapp As late summer 1951 descends on Elmira, New York, Myra Larkin, thirteen, the oldest child of a large Catholic family, meets a young man she believes to be Mickey Mantle. He chats her up at a local diner and gives her a ride home. The matter consumes her until later that night, when a triple homicide occurs just down the street, opening a specter of violence that will haunt the Larkins for half a century.
Call Number: Fict Rap -- New / Popular

ISBN: 9780316434164

Publication Date: 2024-03-19

Recent Winners in NON-FICTION: 2025

Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life
by Ferris Jabr The notion of a living world is one of humanity's oldest beliefs. Though scorned by scientists in the sixties and seventies, the facts supporting this concept have now become tenets of modern Earth system science, a relatively young field that studies the living and nonliving components of the planet as an integrated whole.
Call Number: 570.1 Jab -- New / Popular

ISBN: 9780593133972

Publication Date: 2024-06-25
Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space
by Adam Higginbotham The ... dramatic, minute-by-minute story of the Challenger disaster based on ... new archival research and in-depth reporting--a riveting history that reads like a thriller
Call Number: 363.124 Hig -- New / Popular

ISBN: 9781982176617

Publication Date: 2024-05-14
John Lewis: A Life
by David Greenberg Born into poverty in rural Alabama, Lewis would become second only to Martin Luther King, Jr. in his contributions to the Civil Rights Movement. He was a Freedom Rider who helped to integrate bus stations in the South, a leader of the Nashville sit-in movement, the youngest speaker at the 1963 March on Washington, and the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which he made into one of the major civil rights organizations.
Call Number: B Lewis -- New / Popular

ISBN: 9781982142995

Publication Date: 2024-10-08
ELECTRONIC FORMAT:
eBook
Kent State: An American Tragedy
by Brian VanDeMark On May 4, 1970, at Kent State University in Ohio, political fires that had been burning across America during the 1960s exploded. Antiwar protesters wearing bell-bottom jeans and long hair hurled taunts and rocks at another group of young Americans--National Guardsmen sporting gas masks and rifles. At half past noon, violence unfolded with chaotic speed, as guardsmen--many of whom had joined the Guard to escape the draft--opened fire on the students.
Call Number: 378.7713 Van -- New / Popular

ISBN: 9781324066255

Publication Date: 2024-08-13
Native Nations: A Millennium in North America
by Kathleen DuVal In this magisterial history of the continent, Kathleen DuVal traces the power of Native nations from the rise of ancient cities more than 1000 years ago to the present. She reframes North American history, noting significantly that Indigenous civilizations did not come to a halt when a few wandering explorers or hungry settlers arrived, even when the strangers came well-armed.
Call Number: 970.0049 Duv -- New / Popular

ISBN: 9780525511038

Publication Date: 2024-04-09
ELECTRONIC FORMAT:
eBook
No Road Leading Back: An Improbable Escape from the Nazis and the Tangled Way We Tell The Story of the Holocaust
by Chris Heath This by turns shattering and hope-giving account of prisoners who dug their way out of torture and bondage by the Nazis is both a stunning escape narrative and an object lesson in how we remember and continually forget the particulars of the Holocaust.
Call Number: 940.531 Hea -- New / Popular

ISBN: 9780805243710

Publication Date: 2024-09-03
Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde
by Alexis Pauline Gumbs We remember Audre Lorde as an iconic writer, a quotable teacher whose words and face grace T-shirts, nonprofit annual reports, and campus diversity-center walls. But even those who are inspired by Lorde’s teachings on 'the creative power of difference' may be missing something fundamental about her life and work, and what they can mean for us today. Lorde’s understanding of survival was not simply about getting through to the other side of oppression or being resilient in the face of cancer. It was about the total stakes of what it means to be in relationship with a planet in transformation.
Call Number: B Lorde -- New / Popular

ISBN: 9780374603274

Publication Date: 2024-08-20
There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension
by Hanif Abdurraqib While Hanif Abdurraqib is an acclaimed author, a gifted poet, and one of our culture's most insightful music critics, he is most of all, at heart, an Ohioan. Growing up in Columbus in the '90s, Abdurraqib witnessed a golden era of basketball, one in which legends like LeBron were forged, and countless others weren't.
Call Number: 796.323 Abd -- New / Popular

ISBN: 9780593448793

Publication Date: 2024-03-26
Whiskey Tender: A Memoir
by Deborah Taffa A memoir of family and survival, coming-of-age on and off the reservation, and the frictions between being raised to strive towards the American dream while also coming into an understanding of how the narratives of the Quechan Nation and Laguna Pueblo heritages have been excluded from the central mythologies and structures of America.
Call Number: B Taffa -- New / Popular

ISBN: 9780063288515

Publication Date: 2024-02-27
Why Animals Talk: The New Science of Animal Communication
by Arik Kershenbaum Animal communication has forever seemed intelligible. We are surrounded by animals and the cacophony of sounds that they make-from the chirping of songbirds to the growls of lions on the savanna-but we have yet to fully understand why animals communicate the way they do. What are they saying? This is only part of the mystery. To go deeper, we must also ask, what is motivatingthem?
Call Number: 591.59 Ker -- New / Popular

ISBN: 9780593654934

Publication Date: 2024-08-06
Why We Remember: Unlocking Memory’s Power to Hold on to What Matters
by Charan Ranganath Memory is far more than a record of the past. In this groundbreaking tour of the mind and brain, one of the world's top memory researchers reveals the powerful role memory plays in nearly every aspect of our lives, from recalling faces and names, to learning, decision-making, trauma and healing. A new understanding of memory is emerging from the latest scientific research.
Call Number: 153.12 Ran -- New / Popular

ISBN: 9780385548632

Publication Date: 2024-02-20