Finalists for 2012 National Book Awards Announced

Posted on October 23, 2012

The finalists for the 2012 National Book Awards have been announced. There were 1,285 books submitted by publishers for the awards in 2012. They included 311 fiction, 479 nonfiction, 181 poetry and 314 young people's literature. The finalists in fiction, nonfiction and children's are listed below. The covers of the fiction finalists are pictured above.

Fiction Finalists

• Junot Diaz, This Is How You Lose Her (Riverhead Books)
• Dave Eggers, A Hologram for the King (McSweeney's Books)
• Louise Erdrich, The Round House (Harper)
• Ben Fountain, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (Ecco)
• Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds (Little, Brown and Company)

Nonfiction Finalists

• Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1945-1956 (Doubleday)
• Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity (Random House)
• Robert A. Caro, The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Volume 4 (Knopf)
• Domingo Martinez, The Boy Kings of Texas (Lyons Press)
• Anthony Shadid, House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Young People's Literature

• William Alexander, Goblin Secrets (Margaret K. McElderry Book)
• Carrie Arcos, Out of Reach (Simon Pulse)
• Patricia McCormick, Never Fall Down (Balzer+Bray)
• Eliot Schrefer, Endangered (Scholastic)
• Steve Sheinkin, Bomb: The Race to Build-and Steal-the World's Most Dangerous Weapon (Flash Point)

The awards will be announced at the National Book Awards Ceremony, which will be held on November 14.

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