National Book Critics Circle Award: fiction

The National Book Critics Circle Awards are annual American prizes that promote "the finest books and reviews published in English." The first awards were presented in 1976, for books published in 1975. There are now six awards for books published in the U.S. during the preceding year, in six categories: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, biography, memoir/autobiography, and criticism. 

2023: I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home, by Lorrie Moore

2022: Bliss Montage, by Ling Ma

2021: The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois, by Honoré Fanonne Jeffers

2020: Hamnet, by Maggie O'Farrell

2019: Everything Inside, by Edwidge Danticat

2018: Milkman, by Anna Burns

2017: Improvement, by Joan Silber

2016: LaRose, by Louise Erdrich

2015: The Sellout, by Paul Beatty

2014: Lila, by Marilynne Robinson

2013: Americana, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

2012: Bill Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, by Ben Fountain

2011: Binocular Vision: New and Selected Stories, by Edith Perlman

2010: A Visit from the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan

2009: Wolf Hall, by Hilary Mantel

2008: 2666, by Roberto Bolaño

2007: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz

2006: The Inheritance of Loss, by Kiran Desai

2005: The March, by E.L. Doctorow

2004: Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson

2003: The Known World, by Edward P. Jones

2002: Atonement, by Ian McEwan

2001: Austerlitz, by W.G. Sebald

2000: Being Dead, by Jim Crace

1999: Motherless Brooklyn, by Jonathan Lethe

1998: The Love of a Good Woman, by Alice Munro

1997: The Blue Flower, by Penelope Fitzgerald

1996: Women in Their Beds, by Gina Berriault

1995: Mrs. Ted Bliss, by Stanley Elkin

1994: The Stone Diaries, by Carol Shields

1993: A Lesson Before Dying, by Ernest J. Gaines

1992: All the Pretty Horses, by  Cormac McCarthy

1991:  A Thousand Acres, by Jane Smiley

1990: Rabbit at Rest, by John Updike

1989: Billy Bathgate, by E.L. Doctorow

1988: The Middleman and Other Stories, by Bharati Mukherjee

1987: The Counterlife, by Philip Roth

1986: Kate Vaiden, by Reynolds Price

1985: The Accidental Tourist, by Anne Tler

1984: Love Medicine, by Louise Erdrich

1983: Ironweed, by William Kennedy

1982: George Mills, by Stanley Elkin

1981: Rabbit Is Rich, by John Updike

1980: The Transit of Venus, by Shirley Hazard

1979: The Year of the French, by Thomas Flanagan

1978: The Stories of John Cheever, by John Cheever

1977: Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison

1976: October Light, by John Gardner

1975: Ragtime, by E.L. Doctorow