National Book Award finalists

A look at the five fiction and five nonfiction books nominated for a 2011 National Book Award. The fiction award went to Jesmyn Ward, author of “Salvage the Bones,” while the nonfiction award went to Stephen Greenblatt for his book “The Swerve: How the World Became Modern.”

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FICTION: "The Tiger's Wife: A Novel" by Tea Obreht. After her beloved grandfather dies, a young Balkan doctor explores his past and uncovers unknown, even magical elements, of his life and hers.

Random House /

FICTION: "The Sojourn" by Andrew Krivak. A young American comes of age in Slovakia during World War II in this harrowing portrait.

Bellevue Literary Press

FICTION: "Binocular Vision: New and Selected Stories," by Edith Pearlman. Twenty-one short stories cut a swath across the world from Jerusalem to Maine, in this collection by one of the great doyennes of letters.

Lookout

FICTION: "Salvage the Bones," by Jesmyn Ward. As Hurricane Katrina bears down on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, a broken family must pull together in this powerful, poetic novel.

Bloombury

FICTION: "The Buddha in the Attic," by Julie Otsuka. A group of Japanese women voyage to San Francisco to marry but eventually find themselves forced into internment camps during World War II.

Knopf

NONFICTION: "The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism" by Deborah Baker. A Jewish-American woman in search of moral absolutes converts to Islam and moves to Pakistan, but rather than finding herself, she finds contradiction, emotional turmoil and disillusionment.

Graywolf

NONFICTION: "Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution" by Mary Gabriel. Karl Marx’s life and career are viewed from his wife and family in this gripping, ambitious biography.

Little, Brown

NONFICTION: "The Swerve: How the World Became Modern" by Stephen Greenblatt. When a Renaissance bookhunter discovers the only known copy of Lucretius’s “On the Nature of Things,” the whole world begins to change.

Norton

NONFICTION: "Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention" by Manning Marable. This biography of the civil rights icon is artful, rich and deeply researched.

Viking

NONFICTION: "Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout" by Lauren Redniss. Physics bonds happen in love, too, and few were more profound than the relationship between Marie and Pierre Curie, beautifully told in the first graphic narrative nominated for a National Book Award in nonfiction

It! Books

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