Prizewinners that actually earn the medal on the cover

A prize sticker can be a warning as much as a promise. Too many 'important' novels are admired and unfinished. These aren't.

Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao won the 2008 Pulitzer with a voice that fuses Spanglish, comic books, and dictatorship history into something no one had heard before. George Saunders's Lincoln in the Bardo took the 2017 Booker with a graveyard chorus of ghosts, and turned a formal experiment into a gut-punch about grief. Andrew Sean Greer's Less proved a comic novel could win the Pulitzer without losing its heart.

Then the heavier hitters: Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch, a Dickensian coming-of-age around a stolen painting; Toni Morrison's Beloved, the ghost story of slavery; and Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad, which won both the Pulitzer and the National Book Award by making a metaphor terrifyingly literal.

The lesson: the best prizewinners don't ask you to eat your vegetables. They grab you by the collar. Start with any of these six and the medal will feel earned.