Andrew Krivak has won the $10,000 Dayton Literary Peace Prize for fiction for The Sojourn and Adam Hochschild took the $10,000 prize for nonfiction for To End All Wars.
The Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation also picked two runners-up: Nanjing Requiem by Ha Jin and Day of Honey by Annia Ciezadlo. All the winners will be celebrated at a ceremony hosted by journalist Nick Clooneyin Dayton on November 11th.
Below, we’ve linked to free samples of all the books named as finalists for the prestigious prize.
Free Samples of the 2012 Dayton Literary Peace Prize Finalists
– Nanjing Requiem by Ha Jin (Pantheon Books): The award-winning author of Waiting and War Trash returns to his homeland in a searing new novel that unfurls during one of the darkest moments of the twentieth century: the Rape of Nanjing.
– Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward (Bloomsbury): A big-hearted novel about familial love and community against all odds, and a wrenching look at the lonesome, brutal, and restrictive realities of poverty in rural Mississippi, Salvage the Bones won the National Book Award for fiction.
– Shards by Ismet Prcic (Grove Atlantic): A harrowing coming-of-age novel about a young Bosnian, also named Ismet Prcic, who flees his war-torn homeland and struggles to reconcile his past with his present life in California.
– The Cat’s Table by Michael Ondaatje (Knopf): The Cat’s Table is a spellbinding story about the magical, often forbidden, discoveries of childhood, and a lifelong journey that begins unexpectedly with a spectacular sea voyage from Sri Lanka to London.
– The Grief of Others by Leah Hager Cohen (Riverhead): The Grief of Others is a beautifully moving family drama about love, loss and healing in the aftermath of a newborn’s death.
– The Sojourn by Andrew Krivak (Bellevue Literary Press): A stirring novel of brotherhood, survival, and coming-of-age during World War One.
The 2012 nonfiction finalists are:
– A Train in Winter by Caroline Moorehead (HarperCollins): A Train in Winter tells the tale of 230 French women who were sent to Auschwitz for daring to oppose the Nazis, offering a fascinating glimpse of a little-known chapter in the history of World War II.
– Day of Honey by Annia Ciezadlo (Free Press): Day of Honey is a beautifully written, fiercely intelligent memoir exploring the heightened meaning of cooking in war-torn Baghdad and Beirut.
– Mighty Be Our Powers by Leymah Gbowee (The Perseus Books Group): In a time of death and terror, Leymah Gbowee brought Liberia’s women together—and together they led a nation to peace.
– To End All Wars by Adam Hochschild (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt): Hochschild brings World War I to life as never before by focusing on the long-ignored moral drama of the war’s critics, alongside its generals and heroes.
– What Is It Like to Go to War by Karl Marlantes (Grove/Atlantic): Marlantes draws on his own experiences during and after the Vietnam War in this deeply personal and candid look at the ordeal of combat and its aftermath on the individuals who endure it.