24th Annual Minnesota Book Award Winners

WINNER Genre Fiction The summer of 1919 is over, and on the prairie, an army of men and machines moves across the land, bringing in the harvest. Big Wheat is king as people embrace the gospels of progress and greed. But with Big Wheat comes a serial killer who calls himself the Windmill Man. He believes he has a holy calling to water the earth with blood. The mobile harvest provides an endless supply of ready victims. A young man named Charlie Krueger also follows the harvest. Jilted by his childhood sweetheart he hopes to find a new life as an engineer. But in a newly harvested field in the Dakota night, he has come upon a stange man digging a grave. And in that moment, Charlie becomes the only person who has seen the face of a killer.

WINNER General Nonfiction Reveals how social and policy changes are failing to support scientific research in such key areas as climate change, energy and genetics, counseling readers on how to overcome such challenges as political denials and a lack of scientific government expertise.

WINNER - Novel/Short Story. These stories take place in the space where the rational and irrational intersect--the space governed by the The Law of Miracles. Gregory Black Smith has created a world in which his characters navigate between the everyday and the extraordinary.

WINNER Poetry Whorled confronts and celebrates the many complications of global politics through meditations on war, migration, and culture.

Novel & Short Story -- Follow four friends as they move from The Brady Bunch to Seinfeld, from junior high to middle management. There is Quint, whose rebellion frays into self-destruction; Slow, who struggles to become the worlds first teenage father figure; Chimes, who fears losing his friends while picking up a 7-10 split; and Barb who escapes the conformity of Minnisapa only to find herself returning by dark of night.

Genre Fiction -- Discovering a murdered teen while stranded by a gale on the remote Lake of the Woods, detective Cork O'Connor and his daughter, Jenny, also discover a mysterious baby boy whose life is threatened by powerful adversaries.

General Nonfiction -- University of Minnesota Law School professor Michael Tonry shows how decades of misguided criminal justice policy has resulted in persisting racial injustice in America.

General Nonfiction -- Delves beneath the surface of Nordic America to unearth the beautiful, little-known tales and traditions that exist--from egg coffee to silver-spoon collecting to bizarre home remedies--in a book that covers Americans of Scandinavian descent.

Minnesota -- Fifteen Minnesota nurses spent a year caring for the casualties of a divisive war, only to come home and descend into isolated silence. To heal themselves, they banded together as veterans.

Memoir & Creative Nonfiction -- For Love of Lakes is an affectionate account documenting our species' long relationship with lakes.

Young Peoples Literature - June is starting at her sixth school in four years when she meets Wes, who has just broken up with a girlfriend, and although they do not share an instant or intense connection, attraction turns to love and they wonder where it will lead.

Poetry - Buddha, Proof is a hand-bound chapbook collection of eighteen poems that invites the Buddha into our Western lives as someone with whom we might at last have something in common.

Children's Literature -- Offers actual examples of unusual animal friendships, including a camel and a potbellied pig, a giraffe and an ostrich, and a bear and a cat.