The recent prizewinners everyone will be talking about
The Bookyol Editors · 5 min read
If you want to read what critics and book clubs were actually arguing about in the last couple of years, start here.
Barbara Kingsolver's Demon Copperhead shared the 2023 Pulitzer, a furious, funny reworking of David Copperfield set amid Appalachia's opioid crisis, narrated by a boy you won't forget. It shared the prize with Hernan Diaz's Trust, a four-part puzzle about Gilded Age money and who gets to author the story of a fortune.
Abraham Verghese's The Covenant of Water, an Oprah pick, is the immersive one: a seventy-seven-year family saga in Kerala shadowed by a mysterious affliction. R.F. Kuang's Yellowface is the sharpest satire of the bunch, a white author steals a dead friend's manuscript and rides it to fame, and publishing itself is the target.
And if you want to see how far a novel can bend its form, George Saunders's Booker-winning Lincoln in the Bardo tells a father's grief through a chorus of graveyard ghosts. Ambitious, acclaimed, and genuinely worth the hours.
