from shelf awareness:
The winners of the 15th annual Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Awards are:
Nonfiction
- Winner: Here If You Need Me by Kate Braestrup (Little, Brown)
- Second place honors: Soldier’s Heart by Elizabeth Samet (FSG)
- Third place honors: The Siege of Mecca by Yaroslav Trofimov (Doubleday)
Fiction
- Winner: Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris (Little, Brown)
- Second place honors: The Farther Shore by Matthew Eck (Milkweed Editions)
- Third place honors: Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name by Vendela Vida (Ecco)
The main winners each receive $10,000 and a year of additional marketing and advertising. Second place winners receive $5,000. Third place winner receive $2,500. The winners read last night at the Lincoln Triangle B&N in New York City.
B&N called Here If You Need Me “a heartbreaking memoir. As a young widow with four children, Braestrup recounts her decision to pursue her deceased husband’s quest to work as a chaplain for the Maine warden service and delivers stories from the field, full of compassion, honesty, and wisdom.”
B&N described Then We Came to the End as “the tale of a group of malcontented employees at a declining Chicago ad agency,” and fiction jurist John Burnham Schwartz called it “a blisteringly funny first novel that speaks in a rollicking chorus of complaint and misdirection from within the vast corporate beehive, nailing the species, while never ceasing to recognize the human and particular.”
