Nonfiction
- Patrick Cockburn, The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq (Verso)
- Anne Fessler, The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe V. Wade (Penguin Press)
- Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (Penguin Press)
- Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution (Ecco)
- Sandy Tolan, The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew and the Heart of the Middle East (Bloomsbury)
Fiction
- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun (Knopf)
- Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss (Grove/Atlantic)
- Dave Eggers, What is the What (McSweeney’s)
- Richard Ford, The Lay of the Land (Knopf)
- Cormac McCarthy, The Road (Knopf)
Memoir/Autobiography
- Donald Antrim, The Afterlife (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
- Alison Bechdel, Fun Home (Houghton Mifflin)
- Alexander Masters, Stuart: A Life Backwards (Delacorte)
- Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million (HarperCollins)
- Teri Jentz, Strange Piece of Paradise (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)