Hosseini Beats Bloom, Chabon, Patchett, and Russo for Book Sense Book of the Year

by Staff
3.26.08

Khaled Hosseini's novel A Thousand Splendid Suns (Riverhead) was recently named the winner of the 2008 Book Sense Book of the Year Award in the category of fiction by the American Booksellers Association. Barbara Kingsolver, along with coauthors Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver, won in nonfiction for Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (HarperCollins). The annual awards, also given for children's literature and an illustrated children's book, are judged by employees and owners of independent booksellers nationwide to honor the title they "most enjoyed handselling" during the previous year.

The finalists in fiction were Amy Bloom for Away (Random House), Michael Chabon for The Yiddish Policemen's Union (HarperCollins), Ann Patchett for Run (Harper), and Richard Russo for Bridge of Sighs (Knopf). The finalists in nonfiction were Alan Weisman for The World Without Us (Thomas Dunne Books), Steve Martin for Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life (Scribner), David Halberstam for The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (Hyperion), and A. J. Jacobs for
The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible (Simon & Schuster).

The winning authors will be honored at a ceremony in Los Angeles on May 29.