First Indie Booksellers Choice Awards announced

Thu, 05/26/2011 - 11:27am by sernabad

Last night, at an SRO crowd, the winners of the first annual Indie Booksellers' Choice Awards were announced.

Melville House founder Dennis Johnson said, "The award grew out of my distaste for most literary prizes [which]...laud some individual or book that doesn't really need the stroking... Johnson seems to have been proven prophetic in light of the recent Philip Roth dust-up over his Man Booker International Prize.

Among the winners are:

Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl -- This first novel is set in a nightmarish near future overwhelmed with water and food shortages. Calories are currency and a newly discovered, calorie-rich fruit and a genetically engineered young woman are enough to cause a worldwide revolution.

Wingshooters, by Nina Revoyr -- Racism and familial love collide in 1970s small town Wisconsin when bigot Charlie LeBeau is forced to raise his abandoned mixed-race granddaughter whom he grows to love. Racial tensions escalate when an African American couple move to town.

Another first novel, Karl Marlantes' Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War, was 30 years in the making. Marlantes, a Vietnam vet, writes of the horrors of war in beautiful language.

Rounding out the roster of winners are: The Instructions, by Adam Levin and The Singer's Gun, by Emily St. John Mandel.