Prizewinners worth the hype

Edith Wharton

In Gilded Age New York, a proper gentleman engaged to the perfect wife falls for her scandalous cousin, and old-money society closes ranks.

Junot Diaz

An overweight Dominican-American nerd dreams of love and sci-fi glory while a family curse born under a dictatorship stalks three generations.

George Saunders

The night after his young son's death, a grieving Abraham Lincoln visits the crypt, watched by a chorus of ghosts who cannot admit they are dead.

Andrew Sean Greer

To dodge his ex's wedding, a failing novelist accepts every half-baked literary invitation around the world, and accidentally runs toward his own life.

Margaret Atwood

An elderly woman recalls her sister's mysterious death, unspooling a story within a story within a pulp sci-fi tale that hides the family's darkest truth.

Toni Morrison

Morrison's Pulitzer masterpiece.

Donna Tartt

Tartt's Pulitzer, a painting, a boy, a life.

Colson Whitehead

Whitehead's Pulitzer and National Book Award.

Barbara Kingsolver

A boy born to a teenage mother in the mountains of Appalachia narrates his own hard, funny, heartbreaking survival through foster care and the opioid epidemic.

Hernan Diaz

Four nested accounts, a novel, an autobiography, a memoir, and a diary, circle the fortune of a 1920s Wall Street titan, each version rewriting who really made the money.