The Kojo Nnamdi Show

This year's recommendations for the best winter reading from book editors, librarians and independent bookstore owners.

Barbara Hoffert, editor of the Book Review at Library Journal

Fiction

By Nightfall: A Novel

by Michael Cunningham

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Mink River

by Brian Doyle

Oregon State University Press

The Wake of Forgiveness

by Bruce Machart

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Trade

How to Read the Air

by Dinaw Mengestu

Riverhead Hardcover

Adam & Eve: A Novel

by Sena Jeter Naslund

William Morrow

The Distant Hours: A Novel

by Kate Morton

Atria Books

20 Under 40: Stories from The New Yorker

by

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Non-fiction

How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

by Sarah Bakewell

Other Press

How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming

by Mike Brown

Spiegel & Grau

The Lost Dogs: Michael Vick's Dogs and Their Tale of Rescue and Redemption

by Jim Gorant

Gotham

The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival

by John Vaillant

Knopf

E. Ethelbert Miller, poet, director of the African American Resource Center at Howard University, and author of "How We Sleep On The Nights We Don't Make Love"

The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings

by James Baldwin

Pantheon

Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work (Toni Morrison Lecture)

by Edwidge Danticat

Princeton University Press

Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian

by Avi Steinberg

Nan A. Talese

Crave Radiance: New and Selected Poems 1990-2010

by Elizabeth Alexander

Graywolf Press

No Surrender: Poems

by Ai

W. W. Norton & Company

Mentor: A Memoir

by Tom Grimes

Tin House Books

Terry Hong, "BookDragon" blogger for the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Program

Non-fiction

Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen

by Christopher McDougall

Knopf

Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide

by Nicholas D. Kristof, Sheryl WuDunn

Vintage

Fiction

I Hotel

by Karen Tei Yamashita

Coffee House Press

Long for This World: A Novel

by Sonya Chung

Scribner

Graphic Novels

How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less

by Sarah Glidden

Vertigo

Naoki Urasawa's Monster, Vol. 17

by Naoki Urasawa

VIZ Media LLC

Picture Books

Mirror

by Jeannie Baker

Candlewick

It's a Book

by Lane Smith

Roaring Brook Press

Spork

by Kyo Maclear

Kids Can Press, Ltd.

The Sandwich Swap

by Queen Rania of Jordan Al Abdullah, Kelly DiPucchio

Hyperion Book CH