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Awards & Book News

Ferdia Lennon’s Glorious Exploits (Holt; LJ starred review) wins the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction, The Guardian reports.

The winners of the Christianity Today Book Awards are revealed, Publishers Weekly reports.

Susannah Dickey’s ISDAL (Picador Poetry) wins the inaugural PEN Heaney Prize for poetry published in the UK or Ireland.

The longlist for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize is announced.

Spotify Wrapped now includes audiobook listens; Sarah J. Maas’s A Court of Thorns and Roses was the most-streamed audiobook of 2024. Publishers Weekly and USA Today both have coverage.

Audiofile shares its lists of the best audiobooks of the year; Publishers Weekly has coverage.

New Title Bestsellers

Links for the week: NYT Hardcover Fiction Bestsellers | NYT Hardcover Nonfiction Bestsellers | USA Today Bestselling Books

Fiction

The House of Cross by James Patterson (Little, Brown) finds No. 4 on the USA Today Bestselling Books list.

Christmas in Bethel by Richard Paul Evans (Gallery) dawns at No. 7 on the NYT Hardcover Fiction Bestsellers list.

Nonfiction

Freedom: Memoirs 1954–2021 by Angela Merkel with Beate Baumann (St. Martin’s) reigns at No. 12 on the NYT Hardcover Nonfiction Bestsellers list.

Reviews

Washington Post reviews Woo Woo by Ella Baxter (Catapult): “With Woo Woo, Ella Baxter cements herself as a novelist with a gift for exposing vulnerability under the surface of the absurd…. Baxter yet again plumbs a subculture for fodder, this time using the Melbourne art world as the stage for a powerful study of perception, fear and the creative process.”

LA Times reviews Only Stars Know the Meaning of Space: A Literary Mixtape by Rémy Ngamije (Gallery/Scout): “Ngamije is undeniably an excellent stylist, able to delight, amuse and horrify in equal measure, and Only the Stars Know the Meaning of Space, which feels more connected and cohesive the further you read, is an exciting and fresh approach to a work of collected fictions.”

NPR’s Fresh Air reviews Time of the Child by Niall Williams (Bloomsbury; LJ starred review): “My skepticism, it turns out, was misplaced. I’ve just emerged from a Niall Williams binge with a belated appreciation for his writing, which invests specificity and life in characters and places easily reduced to clichés.”

The Guardian reviews The Best of All Possible Worlds: A Life of Leibniz in Seven Pivotal Days by Michael Kempe, tr. by Marshall Yarbrough (Norton): “Rather than seeking to cover the whole of a complex and restless life, Kempe gives us ‘seven pivotal days’ when Leibniz’s movements and his acts of writing can be pinned down with some precision, and where we can see some of his key insights—such as the formulation of differential calculus, credit for which he disputed throughout his life with Newton and his followers—begin to crystallise”; and Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel by Edwin Frank (Farrar): “Though he has a fine critical judgment, Frank writes as an enthusiast at least as much as an academic, trusting his taste, always alive to the stories he is telling and the arguments he makes.”

LitHub has “five book reviews you need to read this week.”

Briefly Noted

Publishers Weekly talks to Yolanda Pierce, author of The Wounds Are the Witness: Black Faith Weaving Memory into Justice and Healing (Broadleaf).

The Guardian interviews Scotland’s new national poet, Peter Mackay.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World (Scribner; an LJ Best Book of 2024), answers NYT’s “By the Book” questionnaire.

Candida Moss will become the first woman to be general editor of the Anchor Yale Bible Commentary Series from Yale University Press, Publishers Weekly reports.

NYT has a feature on “the Executed Renaissance” of Ukrainian writers whom Stalin silenced in the 1930s.

LitHub hosts a conversation between authors Christian Adofo, Liam Brickhill, and Lior Phillips about the music of the African continent.

T: The New York Times Style Magazine explores lesbian pulp fiction of the 1950s and ’60s.

LitHub shares poems from Invisible Strings: 113 Poets Respond to the Songs of Taylor Swift, ed. by Kristie Frederick Daugherty (Ballantine).

CrimeReads rounds up crime fiction set in the non-Manhattan boroughs of NYC.

HarperCollins announces HarperPop, a new imprint focusing on pop culture, Publishers Weekly reports.

Authors on Air

Today, NPR’s Fresh Air will talk to Caroline Crampton, author of A Body Made of Glass: A Cultural History of Hypochondria (Ecco).

There’s a new episode of The LitHub Podcast, about literary awards season.

Tomorrow, GMA will host Bob Goff, author of Catching Whimsy: 365 Days of Possibility (Thomas Nelson), and the Today Show will feature Clea Shearer, author of The Home Edit for Teens: How To Edit Your Space, Express Your Style, and Get Things Done! (Clarkson Potter).

Shelf Awareness rounds up the schedule for this weekend’s Book TV on C-SPAN 2, at the Wisconsin Book Festival.

Darren Star teams with Hollywood agent Elaine Goldsmith-Thomas to adapt her debut novel, Climbing in Heels (due out from St. Martin’s in April 2025), for TV, Deadline reports.

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