Together, over 700 book reviewers chose the National Book Critics Circle Awards, which are offered in five categories: fiction, general nonfiction, biography/autobiography, poetry, and criticism. Also awarded each year are the Ivan Sandrof Award for Contribution to American Arts and Letters and the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, which is given by the NBCC to one of its members.

2007

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz

Powells.com Staff Pick
Leaping back and forth between the Dominican Republic and New Jersey, pouring across pages in a "combustible mix of slang and lyricism" (quoth Booklist), Oscar Wao bridges several generations and distinct cultures with exhilarating doses of Caribbean history and old-fashioned pulse-pounding drama. Politics, corruption, romance, fantasy, faith, despair — the novel, as Diaz explained in a Powells.com interview, contains multitudes.
Recommended by Dave, Powells.com (read more)

2006

The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai

Review
"This story of exiles at home and abroad...is one of the most impressive novels in English of the past year, and I predict you'll read it almost as Sai read her Brontë, with your heart in your chest, inside the narrative, and the narrative inside you." Chicago Tribune (read more)

2005

The March by E. L. Doctorow

Review
"The book does not just put us in the thick of battle, bullets whizzing by heads, the stench of dead fouling the air. It uses this cataclysm as a powerful metaphor for the dangerous and unstoppable way we humans move through the world." Minneapolis Star Tribune (read more)

2004

Gilead: A Novel by Marilynne Robinson

Powells.com Staff Pick
A story about faith, love, history and growing old, this book is poignant and lovely. It is a long letter from a father who thinks he is soon to die, to his seven-year-old son. Robinson's command of language, her deep understanding of humanity, and her own religious study come together in this outstanding novel. It was worth the twenty-year wait. Beth, Powells.com (read more)

2003

The Known World by Edward P. Jones

Review
"Jones has written a book of tremendous moral intricacy: no relationship here is left unaltered by the bonds of ownership, and liberty eludes most of Manchester County‛s residents, not just its slaves." The New Yorker (read more)

2002

Atonement by Ian McEwan

Review
"Atonement emerges as the author's most deeply felt novel yet....It is a novel that attests not only to Mr. McEwan's mastery of craft and virtuosic control of narrative suspense, but also to his knowledge of the human heart and its rage for symmetry and order." Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times (read more)

2001

Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald

Review
"Sebald stands with Primo Levi as the prime speaker of the Holocaust and, with him, the prime contradiction of Adorno's dictum that after it, there can be no art." Richard Eder, The New York Times Book Review (read more)

2000

Being Dead by Jim Crace

Review
"What a stylist Crace is, and what a vision... Crace has the rare gift of seeing the splendor under the grass. In his 'everending' vision, death and romance are inextricably entwined... [A] tour de force from one of Britain's best novelists." Wendell Brock, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (read more)

1999 Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem