National Book Critics Circle Award (1975-2006)

Over 700 active book reviewers come together each year to award prizes for their top choices in fiction, general nonfiction, biography/autobiography, poetry, and criticism.

Click on the title to read a short summary of the book, and to place a hold.

The number in parentheses after each book is the year in which it was awarded the NBCC Award.

American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin (2006)

Refusing Heaven: Poems by Jack Gilbert (2006)

The March: A Novel by E. L. Doctorow (2006)

The Undiscovered Country: Poetry in the Age of Tin by William Logan (2006)

Them: A Memoir of Parents by Francine Du Plessix Gray (2006)

Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster by Svetlana Alexievich (2006)

The March by E.L. Doctorow (2005)

Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster by Svetlana Alexievich (2005)

American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin (2005)

Them: A Memoir of Parents by Francine du Plessix Gray (2005)

Refusing Heaven by Jack Gilbert (2005)

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson (2004)

The Reformation: A History by Diarmaid MacCulloch (2004)

De Kooning: An American Master by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan (2004)

Known Worlds by Edward P. Jones (2003)

Sons of Mississppi by Paul Hendrickson (2003)

Khrushchev : the man and his era by William Taubman (2003)

The Atonement: A Novel by Ian McEwan (2002)

“A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide by Samantha Power (2002)

Charles Darwin: The Power of Place by Janet Browne (2002)

Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald (2001)

Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper by Nicholson Baker (2001)

Boswellís Presumptuous Task: The Making of the Life of Dr.Johnson by Alan Sisman (2001)

Being Dead by Jim Crace (2000)

Newjack : Guarding Sing Sing by Ted Conover (2000)

Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan by Herbert P. Bix (2000)

Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem (1999)

Time, Love, Memory: A Great Biologist and His Quest for the Origins of Behavior by Jonathan Weiner (1999)

The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White by Henry Wiencek (1999)

The Love of a Good Woman by Alice Munro (1998)

We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families by Philip Gourevitch (1998)

A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar (1998)

The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald (1998)

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman (1997)

Ernie Pyle's War: America's Eyewitness to World War II by James Tobin (1997)

Women in Their Beds by Gina Berriault (1996)

Bad Land by Jonathan Raban(1996)

Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt(1996)

Mrs. Ted Bliss by Stanley Elkin (1995)

A Civil Action by Jonathan Harr (1995)

Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson by Robert Polito (1995)

The Stone Diaries by Carol Shields (1994)

The Rape of Europa : the fate of Europe's treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War by Lynn H. Nicholas (1994)

Shot in the Heart by Mikal Gilmore (1994)

A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines (1993)

The Land Where the Blues Began by Alan Lomax(1993)

Genet by Edmund White (1993)

All the Pretty Horses by Susan Jeffers(1992)

Young Men and Fire by Norman Maclean (1992)

Writing Dangerously: Mary McCarthy and Her World by Carol Brightman (1992)

A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley (1991)

Backlash: The Undeclared War Against America Women by Susan Faludi (1991)

Patrimony: A True Story by Philip Roth (1991)

Rabbit at Rest by John Updike (1991)

Content of Our Character : a New Vision of Race in America by Shelby Steele (1990)

Means of Ascent: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, vol. II by Robert A. Caro (1990)

Billy Bathgate by E.L. Doctorow (1989)

The Broken Cord by Michael Dorris(1989)

A First-Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt by Geoffery C. Ward (1989)

The Middleman and Other Stories by Bharati Mukherjee (1988)

Parting the Waters: America in the King Years by Taylor Branch (1988)

Oscar Wilde by Richard Ellman (1988)

The Counterlife by Philip Roth (1987)

The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes (1987)

Chaucer: His Life, His Works, His World by Donald Roy Howard (1987)

Kate Vaiden by Reynolds Price (1986)

War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War by John W. Dower (1986)

Tombee: Portrait of a Cotton Planter by Theodore Rosengarten (1986)

The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler (1985)

Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families by Anthony J. Lukas (1985)

Henry James: A Life by Leon Edel (1985)

Love Medicine by Loise Erdrich (1984)

Weapons and Hope by Freeman J. Dysen (1984)

Dostoevsky, The Years of Ordeal, 1850-1859 by Joseph Frank (1984)

Ironweed by William Kennedy (1983)

The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House by Seymour M. Hersh (1983)

Minor Characters by Joyce Johnson (1983)

George Mills by Stanley Elkin (1982)

The Path of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro (1982)

Rabbit is Rich by John Updike (1981)

The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen J. Gould (1981)

Part of Nature, Part of Us: Modern American Poets by Helen H. Vendler (1980)

The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard (1980)

Walter Lippmann and the American Century by Ronald Steel (1980)

The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels (1979)

The Year of the French: A Novel by Thomas Flanagan (1979)

Facts of Life by Maureen Howard (1978)

Modern Art, 19th and 20th Centuries: Selected Papers by Meyer Schapiro (1978)

The Stories of John Cheever by John Cheever (1978)

Day by Day by Robert Lowell (1977)

On Photography by Susan Sontag (1977)

Samuel Johnson by Walter Jackson Bate (1977)

Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison (1977)

Geography III: Poems by Elizabeth Bishop (1976)

October Light by John Gardner (1976)

The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales by Bruno Bettelheim (1976)

The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts by Maxine Hong Kingston (1976)

Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell Jr. (1975)

Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow (1975)

Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror: Poems by John Ashbery (1975)