Each year, library professionals and booksellers come together to select the winners of the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction. This week, they announced the 46 books on their longlist for the 2021 award, which includes some of the most talked about books of the past year.
“This was unquestionably a challenging year for all the obvious reasons. There were times one didn’t feel especially like reading,” said Bill Kelly, adult programming manager for Cuyahoga County Public Library and 2021 Carnegie selection committee chair, in a press release. “And yet, in the end, reading proved to be just the balm one needs to sustain us, to give hope and strength and resilience in the face of an oppressively uncertain future.”
The selection committee will announce the six-title short list as the award’s shortlist in November, then share the two medal winners (one fiction and one nonfiction) in February 2021. In the meantime, here are all the picks on their longlist:
Fiction
Red Dress in Black and White, by Elliot Ackerman
Homeland Elegies, by Ayad Akhtar
The Vanishing Half, by Brit Bennett
Parakeet, by Marie-Helene Bertino
The Night Watchman, by Louise Erdrich
Crooked Hallelujah, by Kelli Jo Ford
Transcendent Kingdom, by Yaa Gyasi
Bring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino, by Julián Herbert
Pew, by Catherine Lacey
Luster, by Raven Leilani
A Burning, by Megha Majumdar
The Glass Hotel, by Emily St. John Mandel
Deacon King Kong, by James McBride
Apeirogon, by McCann, Colum
Hurricane Season, by Fernanda Melchor
Utopia Avenue, by David Mitchell
Hamnet, by Maggie O’Farrell
Echo on the Bay, by Masatsugu Ono
Jack, by Marilynne Robinson
Shuggie Bain, by Douglas Stuart
Here We Are, by Graham Swift
The Last Great Road Bum, by Héctor Tobar
Run Me to Earth, by Paul Yoon
Interior Chinatown, by Charles Yu
Memorial, by Bryan Washington
Nonfiction
Humankind: A Hopeful History, by Rutger Bregman
The Undocumented Americans, by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
Eat the Buddha: Life and Death in a Tibetan Town, by Barbara Demick
Fathoms: The World in the Whale, by Rebecca Giggs
The Beauty in Breaking, by Michele Harper
The King of Confidence: A Tale of Utopian Dreamers, Frontier Schemers, True Believers, False Prophets, and the Murder of an American Monarch, by Miles Harvey
Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, by Cathy Park Hong
Paper Bullets: Two Artists Who Risked Their Lives to Defy the Nazis, by Jeffrey H. Jackson
Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family, by Robert Kolker
Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America, by Laila Lalami
God’s Shadow: Sultan Selim, His Ottoman Empire, and the Making of the Modern World, by Alan Mikhail
The Dragons, the Giant, the Women, by Wayétu Moore
The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X, by Les Payne and Tamara Payne
Just Us: An American Conversation, by Claudia Rankine
My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, by Jenn Shapland
Recollections of My Nonexistence, by Rebecca Solnit
The Book of Eels: Our Enduring Fascination with the Most Mysterious Creatures in the Natural World, by Patrik Svensson
Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir, by Natasha Trethewey
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, by Isabel Wilkerson
One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle over American Immigration, 1924-1965, by Jia Lynn Yang
For more information about the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction, visit the award website.
