2024 NATIONAL MEDAL
for Museum and Library Service Finalist

Adults

The River

A masterful tale of wilderness survival in the vein of Into the Wild and The Call of the Wild. It is the story of two college friends on a wilderness canoe trip. A gripping tale of a friendship tested by fire, whitewater, starvation, and brutality.

Normal People

After growing up in very different worlds in a small town in rural Ireland, Connell and Marianne both earn places at Trinity College in Dublin, where a connection grows between them, lasting long into the following years.

The Guest Book

 

The bereaved matriarch of a powerful early-twentieth-century American family makes a fateful decision that reverberates throughout two subsequent generations further impacted by racism, reversed circumstances, and disturbing revelations.

Mostly Dead Things

Taking over her family's failing taxidermy shop in the wake of her father's suicide, grief-stricken Jessa-Lynn Morton pursues less-than-legal ways of generating income while struggling to figure out her place among her eccentric loved ones.

Eat a Peach: A Memoir

From the chef behind Momofuku and star of Netflix's Ugly Delicious and#8212;an intimate account of the making of a chef, the story of the modern restaurant world that he helped shape, and how he discovered that success can be much harder to understand than failure.

Winter Grave

When a little girl disappears a few weeks before Christmas, suspicion falls on the last person she was seen with: the teenage loner who gave her a ride home after school. Complicating the matter is the fact that detectives can hardly get a word out of him. When a second child disappears and a police officer is found dead, tensions in the small town of Strömstad reach an all-time high.

Cartier's Hope

 

New York, 1910: Vera Garland is set on making her mark in a man's world of serious journalism. After the world-famous Hope Diamond is bought by Pierre Cartier, Vera begins investigating rumors about his scheme to manipulate its value. Appealing to a young Russian jeweler for help, Vera is unprepared when she gets caught up in his deceptions and finds herself at risk of losing all she has worked so hard to achieve.

When Time Stoped: A Memoir of My Father's War and What Remains

In 1941, the first Neumann family member was taken by the Nazis, arrested in German-occupied Czechoslovakia for bathing in a stretch of river forbidden to Jews. He was transported to Auschwitz. Eighteen days later his prisoner number was entered into the morgue book. Of thirty-four Neumann family members, twenty-five were murdered by the Nazis. One of the survivors was Hans Neumann, who, to escape the German death net, traveled to Berlin and hid in plain sight under the Gestapo's eyes.